If your hesitation is resting on inability / delay in qualifying for your second.. 1) most importatnly, you need to start with one..and househacking with low down is the best way to start. 2) buy that first one with intent of leveraging it to buy the 2nd/3rd property, IE live-in flip or find a motivated seller offering a steep discount.

You sort of answered this in your post though, where you mention keeping the cashflow for myself, and I don't think it's a great idea to charge an upfront fee for these deals.

I own/operate over 150 units in Pittsburgh and you can find every sort of real estate investment play here.

If your looking for the least amount of risk and biggest bang for your buck I would look for a company that is a reputable turnkey provider thats actually in Detroit and offers things such as an efficient boots on the ground team, all sorts of established local relationships, solid in-house management, an operation that is highly skilled and well versed in section 8, a company that has proven relationships with both out of state and local lenders.

Find out what is motivating them and lean in on that.

But I feel when booking all sorts of things that unanswered bad reviews feel like confessions from the seller/owner/etc. that the review is correct.Some landlords and sellers hire companies to threaten to sue people who leave bad reviews if they can't back up their assertions.

Or some sort of JV.We're speaking with Builders now who want to handle the horizontal development themselves. 

I suppose it could be a first time in history sort of thing but as far as statistics go the market has always recovered and always went up further than ever before.

Sellers who are still on the market in Nov/Dec tend to be highly motivated and prices start dropping.

If you want to buy, give a couple Sears Outlets a call, they normally have a couple sets around and since they likely sit for a decent amount of time the store might be motivated to drop the price a bit to move it.