They can take over most of the brunt of the hassles; but sparing you just one month's vacancy alone can make the expense a good investment.

A lot of the time someone successful in the real estate business does not have a TON of spare time to spend educating someone newer so you need to find ways to create value for them in order to build a fruitful relationship 

He will rent out the spare rooms on the side of the duplex that he is living in and have a tenant on the other side of the duplex. 

I have two additional questions, if you could spare a little more advice.1.

I bought a single family house with a low down payment and immediately rented the spare bedrooms allowing me to live for free while building equity and experience as a landlord.

He worked his way out, by building a porfolio in his spare time.

They likely home office out of a spare bedroom.

After a while I started renting out spare bedrooms once I learned about the power of real estate investing, and eventually moved out to get it fully booked.

BP has the calculators, so I would just do a separate packet per property, so that folks could see how it might look in bulk.The local REI group meetups are also good for getting to know private lenders, who have some spare cash sitting around.

I checked in a month after I sent the money and he said they had some delays with contractors and his partner had to go back to work so he was doing the work in his spare time on nights and weekends.