My biggest responsibility is to the home owners of the houses that I buy or contract.  

It seems like financing is the biggest barrier to getting started for a lot of people I listen to, so when an answer appears to be right there in black and white, we want to believe it and follow that course. 

Sam Zell has one of the biggest and most successful ones.

The biggest challenge is some data is just not free or hard to get or half the time you will be fixing bad data or in some circumstances a local county doesn't even have data online.  

The downside is less volume and higher price points with higher initial costs including longer vacancies.

They will all offer you something different in terms of upside and downside, property types, returns, risk level, etc.

That would be the downside, the upside is that there are deals out there that are homepath properties, so if your willing to jump through the hoops it is worth it.

My biggest expense is day care for my new son.I've been doing some research on land contracts as an option if I can't find options with banks. 

There are several benefits, but we're already realizing that one of the biggest will be not having to wait around or schedule appts on someone else's time.

Also, one of the biggest thing to check is the buyer and their creditworthiness, as well as digging to see if the valuation of the property is what they say it is.