I always recommend to anyone start with a duplex, manage it from there and then grow. 

Purchase price: $726,000 Cash invested: $1,300,000 Sale price: $4,500,000 We are developing a 4 story a luxury Duplex on Indian Rocks Beach FL.

We are looking to invest out of state, and we have small cash to start.

@Anna Laud was correct anything in real estate is built on the relationships you develop because someone usually has either the product or answers to what you are looking for.

One easy way to start evaluating a market is looking on Furnished Finder, VRBO/Airbnb (30+ day stays), and Zillow to find other listings in your market and see how many, what they are charging, and generally what they look like.

This is what I recommend for you to get started in your real estate journey:1.

I have started looking for listings recently.I am a bit confused when people ask to "shop around" for a conventional loan.

And no matter what, straight percentages of the income don't work...unless of course you slide the percentage around for the above-named variables, but at the end of the day your resulting answer will break down to $/unit so you might as well just start there and dump the percentages.

Lastly, I'm a current homeowner and have started to think about our next move.

Perhaps the stress might then start getting to you and lead to an illness & expensive medical treatments that weren't fully covered by insurance.