The reason we came out so cheap, though, is because the house’s water source was a spring up on the hill behind it.

If you sell there it’s gonna have to be really cheap

We typically buy when they are having a sale at Lowe's here in CT or we buy from a local place called CAFD.One tip to pass along is to do your research on the delivery charges and service that the store offers.  

Rates change daily (and sometimes even during the day if there is enough movement in the market) and it's tricky to compare today's rate with those that were locked last month or closed months ago etc.If you have a Costco membership, you can go through them to find a few lenders in their network that will do the loan for cheap. 

The barrier to entry on a cheap website domain that looks professionally done with WordPress is pretty reasonable, but you do not want to get sidetracked on creating something overly complicated. 

@Eamonn McElroy  In Midwest region if you have 75% mortgage on your rental and you invest in good area (not super cheap with high cashflow and high risks), your numbers may look like this: 50% of your cash goes to Mortgage -Insurance -Taxes, your interest, Ins and RE Taxes are tax deductible. 10% of cashflow may be you Property Management expenses, 10-20% may be your repairs and improvements. 

For my first investment, I do plan to house-hack a small multifamily property in hopes to start building my portfolio while getting the benefits of living there for cheap and gaining hands on experience of being a landlord. 

talk is cheap I know.. so lets step it up shall we?

@Haven Latimer Typically FSBOs are people who dont want to pay a realtor for some reason (ie: they are an investor, they are too cheap to pay a realtor, they want to have complete control over the process etc) .

The war zone comment above was a cheap shot... sorry, but I hope I am able to explain in this post why cap rate just does not help me.Cheers...