I agree that a lot of heavily educated individuals believe they're smarter than everybody, thus creating obstacles in buying real estate.

Recession is different thing.If you ask which business got impacted heavily by recession ?

This means most VRs will be heavily used in one season and lightly if at all in another. 

BACKGROUND:Ive been doing research for the past 6 months and finally starting to put together a strategy to go after my niche...but first, a little about me25 years old, full time mechanical engineer, currently renting at $1050/mo, have 35k in student loans, and 25k truck payment. credit score in the 680-700s. not much in savings but starting to save heavily. 

Once you see one that makes any logical sense, you pounce on it (after further review of course; Also, I heavily utilized friends/acquaintances that were also investors to get their take on the said property I was interested in.

@Will Rodriguez I'm from the Chicago Burbs, so I won't have much weight to my input, but I would caution you to actually come take a look as Chicago's neighborhoods are really block by block on what's a D/C to a B/A neighborhood in some areas.From what I can see, you don't want to just use Trulia / similiar macro statistics if you're looking at properties, because in some areas if you're literally on the wrong side of the street, you're in the 'bad' part of town.Crime in general seems to be heavily gang related and most places that I've driven through you won't have to worry, but then again I don't live in the city and the parts of town that I travel to aren't sketchy.

Cost of repairs is anywhere between $10-15k and this includes replacing some pretty heavily damaged aluminum windows.

When you get into much larger properties then not getting these items losses can be heavily amplified. 

The amount of management and churn rate of tenants is heavily dependent many times on the area.

We're in 2019 and as far as listings go that is yesterday's news buyers all have access to the internet, albeit it's not the MLS, the fact is that buyers no longer depend on us as heavily as before in which we as agents held all the cards (listings); representation, ask your broker if you can represent your buyer in court and he'll look at you like its your last day working there, that is the job of a real estate attorney, so that's out; acting as a neutral third party - that's the title company's responsibility.