I'm also going to scour this site for information on LLCs....right now our properties our under our personal names and an LLC never occurred to me.

Think of yourself as a mini-hedge fund, managing others' private equity.Alternatively, scour the local craigslist for 'owner' or 'seller' key words, you're looking for seller financing, usually investors ready to cash out but afraid of the capital gains taxes.Another option is 'subject to' deals, where you give a small down payment and simply take over the existing mortgage.

Scouring VRBO, Homeway, Flipkey has turned up pretty solid vacancy rates from Oct - Apr.

After scouring the web for hours for transactional funding companies and state tax websites.

FYI, my wife is a newer real estate agent which means we have access to the MLS, so if scouring that is a smarter way to go, that's an option as well.

So, the sole upside is that I've spent all morning scouring the internet working with the info that @Wayne Brooks shared, so I'm not in a position of (total) ignorance again.  

Since then I have been scouring the forums reading countless articles and have been listening to even more podcasts.My goals are to learn more about the real estate business and investment opportunities available to me.

Finally, scour the forums here for others doing this, often referred to as house hacking.

Scour the listings; eliminating any properties which will be stayed or continued.3.)

You will need to scour the area and run the numbers in order to determine the level of deal it would be.