There were a handful of repairs we had to make, just to get it livable.However, we bought this home to eventually turn into a single family and restore.

I live in SC but the property I am buying is in NC (we plan on moving back to NC eventually).

I may not love it, but eventually I hope to scale and have someone doing all that for me! 

I am interested in Real Estate to eventually provide some more financial freedom.

I am evaluating some properties to flip and need someone to go through a few properties for estimates and eventually to actually do the work.Can anybody steer me in the right direction? 

But if my end goal is eventually to do multiplexes/apartments, should I dive right into it or get my feet wet first with an SFR given I have no experience?

Eventually the studs get wet and so on until you have a mold problem that won’t go away.

Eventually you'll have a breakthrough. 

I eventually settled on Atlanta for the reasons previously mentioned and also because I found property managers/agents at Excalibur Homes to be extremely responsive and helpful.I did a lot of searching for homes, I made my own excel sheet with formulas to plug in numbers on properties.

You are buying the education, not the community.  20% of the community will do deals and be great contacts and they will insist you have the full Xtreme combo ($20,000) because they want to know you have the same access to info that they do before they will partner with you on deals.  80% of the community knows the same or less than you do and are basically beginners and hopefully they will do deals eventually.  50% of the community events are set up to teach real estate investing, and half are set up to teach you how to sell other people the real estate education.