You must weigh the risk to reward ratio and determine if the "risks" outweigh the benefits. 

Playing catch up perhaps has good reward here.

You just gotta know the in's and out's and the risks and rewards associated with these types of deals. 

But, college can potentially serve as a sort of shortcut, and--importantly--college can expose you to people different than yourself, and ideas that are different than your own more frequently than you might encounter in other formats (though, this can depend on the college--it's definitely possible to find a college that doesn't expose you to anything unfamiliar).But, if you choose the right college, and put in the effort to make connections with the right people, the rewards can be significant and multi-faceted! 

Do you want to be busy showing tenants, cleaning out houses, painting, chasing contractors, etc or do you want to be on the golf course and just checking text messages when the passive cash rewards hit your account.STR is probably a very active business, unless you want to give away most of the returns to 3rd party PMs.SFR I find is still active, but perhaps less so than STR. 

You typically have very few comps and more difficult to prove your ROI.Buy single family, multifamily, commercial....less risk and higher reward in many cases.

Meet demand by establishing a business that serves many people and you will be rewarded.  

Hard to get houses that rent for 2 percent of property value especially in CA.Here in Indiana we have some but they are on older houses with very lower ARVs.You should probably avoid less than 1% as the risk reward gets very hard.Look at it this way:100k home for 1k a month rentTaxes will be about 250 a monthInsurance will be about 100 a monthmaintanance will be 50-200 a monthSo you are looking at cash flow without a mortgage of 400-550 a monthThis gives you a profit of 6k to 7 k a year on a 100k investment which is not too bad.However if you finance it your cash flow drops to 0-150 a month on a 30k investment and 70k leveraged.If that same house rented for 800 (0.8%) then your cash flow would drop to 200-350 a month which would give you 2400 to 4000 a year which is only 2-4% a year on a 100k investment. 

Hedging bets of course that you will not have a total lose but for me the risk vs reward on that is worth it.

It's high risk and high reward when taking over a 'mom and pop' property.