With specific and qualifying questions in my ad that must be answered when responded to, I can whittle 30 inquirires down to 3 very fast. 

Fast forward a year and I have a steady job with income now wanting to take my first steps into looking for apartments to hold and rent out in the Knoxville area. 

so I'm always "sneaking around" looking for data to see how fast or slow my man is!

I have learned that in todays market finding deals requires marketing techniques and having the right connections.

Making 3x the rent is not a hard-and-fast rule.

Structure partnerships that are mutually beneficial.2) As @Brie Schmidt alluded too, you wont be able to scale as fast as you want and you need to take a slower approach. 

Fast forward a few weeks, I found another but this time I am borrowing a portion of the needed funds from family and covering the rest with what I have available. 

I ended up holding onto two income properties in nice areas of the valley and they produce minor cash flow today, but not significant and the property values are still less than I paid for them.  

Fast forward to closing and its a 20 year amortized loan with a balloon at 10 years. 

Now from a 30,000 ft level, in 30-40 years we will laugh at how cheap the properties were today.