I'm VERY excited to go down this path as a real estate investor :)  I've been lurking for few weeks and decided to post an intro today.

It's a tricky balance sometimes.If you do decide to go down the HM path, make sure you find a lender who is interested in your success, is willing to work with you if things go astray and doesn't judge you based on your credit score.

Then I would work backwards and see which real estate path best helps you reach  your goals.

It took me years to find a guy who was an analytical thinker, even though he did not own rentals he understood better than anyone else.Spending the time to find an agent who has walked the path you want to be on is probably the best investment of your time early on in your career.Many years later I got out of the rat race and "retired" from corporate.

A lot of very intelligent investors will tell you to do so and I wholeheartedly would not blame you for taking their word over mine, however, the way I see it is let's say you buy a blue chip stock and it goes along its projected path...I don't see that as a good preparation to suddenly buying stock in riskier companies.

I've been networking with brokers on MF and there are a ton of off market deals to be had in Huntsville and paths to progress are going W and SE.

Hi Craig,The more straight forward advice would be: Go With What You Know.That being said, I believe that some people tend to take that advice to literally and don't take the time to "Get to Know" and educate themselves about other options that are potentially better for their particular situation.First thing that needs to be done (which you probably already did) is answer the question of how active you are looking to be in your real estate investments.

Does anyone know where the path of progress is heading in Huntsville and who the major employers are?

We are NOT following any path that I would have ever anticipated.

Generally speaking, if you're looking at a property and it's showing expenses of 25%, the 50% guideline gives a new person a basis to believe that number probably isn't the full story.There is no perfect, there is no way to know everything, this is just a nice, easy, straight forward starting point.