If you download the app "meetup" you can find tons of small and large groups.

Adding one property every couple of years.  

Obviously, a large rehab contractor is going to cost lots more than your budget will allow.  

Even through the large losses I've managed to keep an 820's credit score, we'll see if that matters I guess.

My end goal is to have a large portfolio of buy and hold rentals for a nice passive income.

How large of a gap? 

You could play it up and further demonstrate your level of seriousness by saying something like: "This offer is based on our assumption that the property contains a mix of 1 and 2 bedroom units totaling 16 rentable units, along with our initial research of publicly available information."

You have found a great resource here with BP.Read as much as you can, ask questions whenever they arise, setup your alerts for keywords ad subscrie to the sub-forums of interest.

You may get all the way to the closing only to find out that there's no money to close the deal.Most of them will also try to box you in with short repayment periods that are difficult to achieve & if you dont repay within that time will charge you ridiculous penaties or want a large percentage of the deal. 

I have done a research, it appears the law does (DFW, Texas area) require LL to provide a healthy, well contained property for tenants.