Hey @Joseph Luma I have been looking for rental property around the University of Cincinnati and one property management company that keeps popping up is Peak Property Group.

There are plenty of investors that jumped in at the peak of 2006, made it out, and have become very wealthy over the past 5 years. 

It's just hard to maximize your returns when you really only have a peak season and a slower off season. 

I’m looking to purchase a home, ultimately an investment property, prior to finding employment, making traditional financing unobtainable.I have about 90k is cash reserves and approached a family member with the idea of loaning out some cash (around 100k) to earn interest, for me to buy a property outright.

if you leverage that $1300, that would be saved by not buying down the loan, on another investment that can earn a decent return then you are better off paying the slightly higher interest rate and leveraging the buy down money.However, if the money is going to be sitting in a FDIC insured account earning virtually nothing and if you plan to have at least 5 years with the loan (remember the value of money typically declines with time so the payoff is not really as short as 42 months) then I believe the better use of the money is to buy down the loan.  

Also, long term holding is ok with me but what is the minimum duration before you can pull your principal and earnings out? 

The higher the cost of the insurance product via fees is for the buyer, the more money the “advisor” earns as commission.  

However I only got 60% LTV on the refis because my income is almost entirely foreign earned.

I'm sure you'll carry that same passion forward in life with anything you do.Perhaps you can work for a top operator and work to 'learn' (not earn) in the meantime.All the best!

As @Brian Burke mentioned, strong market rent growth means you can buy at 3 cap property today and in under a year be earning a 4+ cap without doing a thing but renewing leases at market rents, and that 4 cap moves to a 5 or 6, even with conservative growth in 3-5 years, not even counting any opportunity for rent growth driven by unit renovations.