Find an all in one or one stop shop service whose mission aligns with your goals and who can provide you with services to assist you versus just products to sell you and who ultimately empowers you by coming along side of you as you begin this great journey of real estate investing.

The main reason was that there are no products to leverage purchases down there.

At the moment my approach is to invest in a property with a buy-and-hold strategy but I am also open to other ideas to star with.

A home warranty is a gimmicky pseudo-insurance product geared towards consumers / homeowners- not multi-unit investors.You should get more details on tenant turnover- I find most tenant turnover is the result of scant attention being paid to tenants.  

Especially one pitching their own products.

But again with some minor modification to your business model you can establish those properties as ones you intend to hold for productive use which would then qualify them.  

Never stop dreaming or reaching for the stars; those that say that "they can't" are the only ones that are ever correct 100% of the time because that in itself is a self fulfilling prophecy. 

I broker my HELOCs to TCF bank specifically because they will accept Fannie and Freddie's standard methods of calculating DTI (which your local credit union obviously is not) instead of re-inventing the wheel, with the only deviation being that they will calculate their own debt obligation more conservatively (which makes sense given that it's an interest only product in 2nd lien position). 

do you have any products for lower FMV's?

Have you guys been to the meetups and are they productive?