So, if they happened to be excellent at their craft and scrupulous (the VAST minority) then great! 

I would say real estate is an excellent vehicle and you should be putting a lot of emphasis on growing your portfolio.

House hacking is an excellent method of getting into our first house.  

Since you can buy your primary residence with no money down, as long as your property has positive cashflow, you have an excellent cash on cash return. 

Everyone here seems to agree that you're not properly leveraging the 2 properties at the moment (even you came here looking for good examples of how to scale appropriately rather than continuing to hedge your bets), and you seem to have prompted responses clearly showing two very strong but opposite paths both argued with excellent logic here... 

After traveling for a year to over 35 countries, we decided to continually work in real estate to help other investors achieve the same financial independence we did by offering turnkey rentals in excellent cash flow markets!

Hi @Chris Martinez, we use Excel for all our rentals (as well as property management software, which varies by PM or if we do it ourselves). 

@Justin Anderson This is excellent material.

We currently own and manage one rental property and the tenant pays us via Venmo and we use excel to track expenses.

Hello Columbus Ohio investors.I'm looking for your recommendations, only from your own experience, for excellent contractors from Columbus and the surrounding area who make renovations to SFH and duplexes.Thanks for your help.David