You will get the most rent per unit for a single family home, because you can offer a yard, garage, maybe a pool, and more privacy.

Good neighborhoods and nice homes generally increase your tenant pool prospects and tend to have far less issues if you do your due diligence.Assuming that you'll be self-managing, make sure that your rental is within an easy commute from your home.

There are a number of factors completely unavailable to us such as capital ratios, quotas, write-offs, internal market analysis, performance of other loans in the pool, etc that desks within banks use to determine whether or not they will accept an offer.Banks get several broker price opinions (BPO's) during the course of the foreclosure and after they own the asset to get an idea of market value and what the property will sell for.  

Be conservative in your estimate of ARV...the pool of buyers is still very limited in this neighborhood due to crime and safety...if you decide to push ahead, your potential buyers may be limited to singles and couples without kids.  

I just want my 'pool' of applicants to be as LARGE as possible.  

Do you like the liquidity of homes as you can sell them a larger pool of buyers when you are ready to cash out?

After diligently reading, listening, following and doing some posting, I finally feel like I have something to contribute to the general knowledge pool for beginners.

It can easily be split down the middle, but that may limit your buyer pool.

I am forming a partnership with a group of 10 friends and would like advice as how to go about creating a bank account for the money pooling.

I went this route too, jumping into the "Asset Protection" paranoia pool.