This environment gives a ray of hope and encouragement to the enormous amount of dry powder sitting around waiting to be deployed.

I'd encourage you to poke around Zillow/Trulia/Redfin/whatever to familiarize yourself with sales prices and rent ranges in different areas and then drill down from there.Does that help at all?

Does anyone have words of encouragement, lol.

I was hoping to property manage from afar to really learn the market and place good tenants into the rentals but with this regulation it feels like they are strongly encouraging you to hire a property management firm.

I HIGHLY encourage you to look into self-directed IRAs and all the options you can invest in. 

@David Asche,While it’s legal, and perhaps even encouraged by the government to avoid taxes by doing things they want us to do (invest, support the housing market, creating jobs, etc.), they really frown on evading taxes.

I would encourage you to treat it like a business. 

Job changes are a big deal to lenders and can potentially be negative so before making a job move I would strongly encourage talking to a lender first.

One of our more recent clients did a LOT of due diligence on us before purchasing a property, and that included all of the following: Speaking to 3 of our other clientsCalling the local police departmentCalling the local news stationResearching the local school district and chamber of commerceSpeaking at length to our Client Specialist (I think it was probably 6 hours on the phone total).Talking to some of our other business contactsAsking about us on BiggerPocketsI always encourage everyone to dig deep.

I'm building a buyers list and I'm very interested in making meaningful connections with good, trustworthy people.