Eventually, you might hit that number, especially with a lot of units in an area with really low vacancies and you're a marketing guru who can keep your vacancy rate below 3% (almost no one is), but initially, I'd expect it to be quite a bit higher, so it'll take a while before things are in the black.I think the standard number is 10% for vacancies alone and 5% for maintenance if you do your own PM, and an extra 3% if you don't. 

I know little about the maintenance and costs to replace if needed.  

I wanted to confirm so that I wasn’t surprised of the amount of exterior maintenance that I had coming my way.

Be sure to use a chunk of that money as a "reserve" for emergency maintenance issues.

Having never owned real estate, a good way to get started would be by owning my primary residence for a while, with the intent of eventually renting it out in a few years and in the meantime seeing how I feel about maintenance and home ownership in general.

Thanks to my high W2 income and not having any debt, it would also be easy to get approved for some cheap 2.x% financing.Having never owned real estate, a good way to get started would be by owning my primary residence for a while, with the intent of eventually renting it out in a few years and in the meantime seeing how I feel about maintenance and home ownership in general.Unfortunately, the areas I am looking at are in very high demand (River North, West Loop, Fulton Market), and have prices such that I would at best barely break even with rent after taking into account HOA and taxes ($300k-500k range for 1-2 bd, HOA in the ~$500/mo).I understand condos in downtown are generally a bad investment, but I really don’t want my quality of life to suffer by moving far just for the sake of home ownership.

Even just gopher/task rabbit type services might help them....putting out signs, putting on lockboxes, changing out locks.I think every apartment complex today is looking for maintenance people. 

Investment has been made to address deferred maintenance items with the objective of refinancing our acquisition loan with non-recourse agency debt once the value-add process is complete, returning a significant portion of LP capital to our investors.

Purchase price: $1,645,000 Cash invested: $475,000 Our firm acquired this property with significant deferred maintenance to be addressed, but with rents ~$200 per month below market.

My background is in darn near everything from new construction of residential and commercial properties, property maintenance, contracting, networking, team building, LLC formation, business ownership and accounting.