I'm a newbie that is just beginning to look at properties to purchase purely for investment purposes, any help and opinions would be much appreciated...

also, going by pure numbers, your initial investment for a duplex would be 120k and rents would be 1200 conservative, which equates to 1% rent/purchase (total investment) ( always see if your deal would work with the most conservative rents, not the gut intuition, because intuition won't pay the mortgage). 1% might struggle to cashflow depending on your expenses and frankly doesnt look like it warrants the level of work needed to achieve that.

This next house will be purchased purely from the perspective that within one year, it will be turned into a rental property.

When you say multifamily are you talking a standard Boston "Triple Decker" or something like that or do you mean some larger apartment building in some other state.If you are looking locally do you plan on living in the place or are you going to have it as a pure investment property?

But from a purely numbers-based decision point, where emotions really cannot impact the decision, it's not going to be a solid investment.

This would purely be an exercise in keeping funds separate and potentially 'inching' away my  husband and some of our jointly owned personal assets from liability.  

And I realize that I like the flexibility of having purely liquid cash.

And I think the Super Bowl will act as a stimulus in attracting more people and development to the city, and of course it would same thing with Amazon, but yes, this is still pure speculation. 

Ditto what Joe Homs said, I live and invest purely in SoCal and have for the last 15 years.

Namely, I am only allowed to receive purely PASSIVE income from any of my investments.