House hacking is a great strategy for beginners—it lets you reduce your living expenses while building equity.

You should be about 50k out of pocket—10k downpayment, 10k closing costs, and about 30k for materials and slight amount of labor (but you are doing most of it yourself). 

sometimes to reduce borrowing costs, I'll use a hard money loan solely for the purchase, and then pay for the rehab in cash or use a 0% credit card (I don't recommend that for new investors!)

Potentially a 'exclusivity in exchange for reduced fees' or 'reduce per-visit fees as the number of calls increases.'

You can overcome this by putting more down, which reduces you ROE and COC return, but if the appreciation is good enough you can make up for this with overall returns over time as rents increase and the property appreciates.

Building more homes is the right idea, but will take years to implement and there are many issues to overcome: we don't even have the labor. 

This is also part software sort of speak, it gets updated with new features...there is work to it, idk if that labor required is intrinsic too maybe.

You can reduce size, if you go deeper, but that only works if you have steep sites or are willing to add a pump system to the outlet. 

If you are working with a reputable company, then you buy the property, hold the property and look up 7-10 years down the road and have a home that has increased in value and a debt that has been reduced by your renter.   

Labor shortages have hit that industry just like everything else, so finding reliable, trustworthy, quality cleaners is a challenge everyone is facing.