for me  a handful since early 80s  now in those days I was ONLY buying land that had owner contracts on them. 

If you can solve their problem, you can usually buy the house.When you are a new wholesaler, the best thing you can do is to get some reps calling and looking for another wholesaler in the area, before you put your own money down on it.

As a newbie, I need someone to guide me from the beginning to try to avoid mistakes and hopefully be very successful.

Well, a lot of life happened and now I am getting back to zero no debt and I'll be renting for now and I am considering a duplex to buy cash or maybe land and some sort of unconventional home but still purchasing cash.

Investment Info:Condo buy & hold investment.

This could work well if you’re looking for steady monthly returns and don’t mind managing tenants (or hiring a property manager).Selling could also make sense if you’d rather use the $500,000 to diversify into other investments, like buying multiple properties or even a short-term rental on the lake as you mentioned.

Investment Info:Single-family residence buy & hold investment.

My thoughts are current housing supply + high rates + high home prices in OR are restricting our options and liquidating the brokerage to pay off the townhouse = $400k asset + $2,400 cash flow that we could then use to leverage or save into buying another property outright or scale into 4 plex and use the rent to pay down that mortgage too.

I think having a balanced budget would be ideal where you allocate money into buying another property and money set aside for renovations.

I've been pleasantly surprised to see a mix of buy and hold, flip, and ADU type opportunities surface, so I figured I'd put them out to the BP community for anyone who's in this market and feeling frustrated.