There's a standing invitation to play, but I'm clueless.)Please extol golf's virtues in the RE investing sphere, OR reassure me I'm missing nothing that's worth carving up some of my finite life for. 

In spots like this, they are 100% of the time worth their cost in my opinion. 

If it's worth $220K say, and you're renting it for $1100, that's only a 0.5% rent/cost.

I'm not sure which ideas are worth the money though.

I'm also in the market for a rental that is for sale for 48k, but it's worth 80k located in Texas.

This may be a long post, but I thought it would be good to walk through everything step-by-step, and explain my thinking along the way.If you want to stick with me through it all, here we go:I was not going to be getting a conventional mortgage for my first property for a number of reasons.First, I am still annoyed at the hoops I had to jump through to get a mortgage for my primary residence.Second, my liquid cash was on the lower end.Third, the properties that I would need to start out with would not be financeable anyway.Fourth, my DTI is on the high side, due to the decision that we made to take out a HELOC to complete interior improvements on my primary house.So, I decided that my path was going to be to form a single member LLC, and take a loan from my 401(k) at work to finance the down payment.Since I do not view the 401(k) loan as a long-term solution, I am treating like hard money, and pay it off ASAP.So, my first deal would be a flip, or a rental that was such a good deal, that I could re-fi out and pull all my cash out.I decided to reach out to the commercial lending department of the local credit union, which I am a member.The person I talked to (who became my lender) is fantastic.I told him what types of properties I was looking for, and that I’d look to turn them into rentals, or to flip them.I will never forget his response, which reminded me why I love this credit union.He said:“Typically, the deals you are talking about are much smaller than the deals we like to do.However, we also realize that you can not get to that level unless someone helps you get there.So, if the numbers make sense, we will see if any of our products fit.”Awesome!

Real estate is a large, functioning market and if the property was worth more than the debt/encumbrances against it the owner would have sold it 99.9% of the time.  

For what it's worth those two houses on 30th st look nice.

The upside is that there is no lien on the property.If you have the ability to do a refinance after a seasoning period, and the house is worth more than you paid for it, consider doing that and pulling out all your capital.If you use a smaller credit union, some will bundle multiple small properties into one blanket loan. 

I just had a property turn over and followed this procedure for the showings:I advertise the property and handle all calls, emails, texts on it and set up viewing appointments (I group them all within 30-45 minutes on one day)The current tenants show the property to prospective rentersWhen someone applies, they email or fax in the application and pay the application fee via PayPal (although I am now trying out Cozy for applications) and I process the applicationIf the application passes, I prepare and email over the lease for signatureWhen the lease is signed and sent back to me, I send over a payment request for the first month's rent (via Dwolla or Cozy)At the check-in, I drive to the property to check them in myself and collect the security deposit in secured funds (or use Cozy to collect it beforehand)I have been doing the above for a long time and it has worked pretty well.