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. 

I'm very interested as I am in a similar situation and have never found a viable solution (for me) other than holding on and hoping the value comes back eventually.

We both agree that we would like to be in the rental space and would eventually like to turn this from a side hustle into our full time jobs.Baby steps...One thing we are having a hard time figuring out/understanding/strategizing is how we go from one property, to two, to three, five and more.If we each put 10k or 15k down for our first multi-family rental, that would be all the funds we could both invest.