When I spoke to the president of the HOA, he told me that a 30% or better funded reserve was considered good but I don't have any basis of comparison and wanted to know if anyone had a good rule of thumb for how well funded an HOA of a 20 year building should be.

There is nothing easy about real estate no matter what arena you want to play in.

Definitely would not rule it out!  

But its easy to run afoul of the prohibited transaction rules.

I'm sure people in both categories will talk about wild success going both routes, but my intuition was to the effect that it's much harder to find a 'deal' than it is to find someone who wants to list their house for top dollar on the MLS (while I certainly do not assume this is easy), but I only have so much time and money, trying to not only create a marketing budget but build systems around both of these businesses.

It appears we can easily get the 1% rule out of SFR rentals (I haven't seen any duplexes in that county) in that area.3.)

The rents/HOA dues compared to the listing prices (140k-220k) make it seem like an easy entry point into real estate with relatively low risk since I will live there initially and a large portion of the property is taken care of.

My single family rental is cash flowing $200/mo the last 5 years on 2% leases and quality, new tenants for single family homes are easy to find.

The issue with land in general is its stark trickiness, there's no way to set a general rule of thumb as to what prices ought to be offered or what an approximate value would be, the reason?

That said,  maintain, be easy to deal with and responsive.