I have an excellent PM company that understands investors and they run me 8%.

Columbia Escrow LLC (in Seward Park) was excellent to work with for my purchase of a Single Family home.  

Then, monthly use excel to create a mini balance sheet or PNL spreadsheet.

NW burbs/Schaumburg meet up sounds excellent...count me in!

They have some excellent ones on the market.

I'll just say that learning to use Excel proficiently for financial modeling has been one of the biggest assets in my understanding of the investment world. 

@Ned Carey  provides some excellent advice about searching surrounding areas.

Find YOUR market, and excel in YOUR niche'. 

It has excellent loan terms so we do not want to lose it.

A little bit about myself for anyone interested:I'm looking to be a buy-and-hold investor while continuing my regular job - I am looking to put money to work and would be potentially interested in doing so as part of someone else's deal; I would consider both SFR and MFR deals.I am an investor in my day job (currently private equity / buyouts, soon to become public equities) so may have some bad habits, or at least industry-specific ones, to break; I generally anticipate being relatively analytical / systematic in looking at dealsMy family held a few properties when I was growing up - I have experience personally doing refurbishing work and secondhand experience with property management activities (this will hopefully help me as contextual information, I don't anticipate taking on an active role in refurb or property management in the near future)Right now, I am trying to educate myself on the process of deal sourcing (MLS, wholesaler buyer lists, etc.) and market data sources; in particular, I would really appreciate any input on good sources for publicly available market-level data in manipulable format such as Excel or .csv as well as input from anyone who uses a systematic deal-screening approach both on their criteria and how they get reliable / quality data into a screening-friendly formatThanks for everything people have already contributed.