Again I am not looking to work with one sole company to do all of these steps before letting me reap the profits at the end.

I have enough cash to buy two out right, but I wonder if its better to leverage my money and buy seven or eight, so that if I get stuck with a bad home I have many others that support the bad one.

However, you can streamline this by putting a system in place.Our first step is income verification.

@Matt Honeyford are you stepping outside of the Rochester area?

The lender is kind of a first step because they can help you know how much money you can qualify to borrow and that's what gets the wheels moving with being able to set goals and analyze properties. 

They are longer and do sell you a little bit on their software but it helped tremendously to teach me the tiny in between steps that you don't get from these shorter summary videos.

You should be focused on "setting the comps" the way builders do, and selling them one at a time with a step-up in sales price each time (just like builders do), not all at once. 

As @Steve Vaughan pointed out, full costs for utilities, lawn upkeep, and snow removal are easily offloaded to the tenant, and if things go crazy on the small lawns the fixer landlord can step in with his equipment and save the day before the municipality gets on his back.It's an affordable way for people with ordinary incomes to get into REI.

ROE over 5 years is too low (I want 15%), you’re creating zero property value and your ROE in this example is being largely impacted by your 3% annual property value growth, that’s a bit high for me at this part of the cycle (2% would make me more comfortable) I would also make the assumption that your rents and expenses are growing in lock step. 

I would say the first step is to find financing (I had the money and the W2 income, so I knew that would not be a problem).