As you learn more, you may discover that some of these rules you're creating aren't useful (for instance, putting 20% down isn't always the best route).It sounds like you're considering an out of state investment--read up on why OOS plays are usually a terrible idea for a beginning investor (I and others have written about this issue a lot on the forums). ...we see tons of beginning investors on the forums with nightmare stories of OOS plays that crashed and burned--read up on those, too.There are far better strategies than OOS for beginning investors.As others have mentioned, a house hack is one of the best ways to get started in REI.

However we decided to use this as an AirBNB and a crash pad for ourselves as needed. 

Flips are nice but I like stuff where if market crashes can still rent it out for a backup. 

They are also very optimistic about their next few years.My bubble clients have mainly gone dark and have been predicting crashes in their personal economies.

I am seeing big projects that got put on hold from the housing crash of 2006 being built now.

Maybe you could even crash with one of those industry contacts you've been making.

You see people on here all the time who have had 3 or 4 great tenants in their one or two units right off the bat and think they're geniuses or that this way is simple, they go all in quitting their job or scaling up too fast and then crash and burn on the first disaster tenant. 

Rising rates impact it's value, but even if it crashes in value to $80M, you still need property managers, maintenance people, lenders, insurance, and more to run the property.

Then there was a banking crisis, many, many banks failed in California and in Texas, the stock market crashed bad.

So just for reference governments and banks and many other smart people got scammed by the horrible loans put together and sold which crashed in 2008.