My Fiance and I are in a great spot, we are saving a good clip of cash each month on average and have enough saved up to put a small down payment down on our first property, have plenty of reserves for issues that pop up both real estate and normal life, and have enough to then in about a year look at another property to put 20% down for conventional financing.

You could get a conventional mortgage and live in the property for a year and put 0-5% down or if you have property assets, you could use them as collateral on a commercial loan or line of credit or a standard HELOC.My credit is only fair and I thought I would not qualify for another HELOC because of lack of reserves and DTI but I recently found a local credit union that approved me for a commercial loan using property as collateral. 

"Ghost" bidding is done by theses auction sites to drive the price up towards the reserve; once reserve is reached (if it is even reached of course), the ghost bidding is supposed to stop. 

It's clear one can't rely on initial cash flow alone and must project future cash flows; as others point out costs could grow faster than rents (e.g. rust belt towns with declining population).Where I'd be interested to hear your thinking is on reserves and the liquidity of the properties you buy.e.g. with hindsight you can always point to which of these two properties provided a greater total return over ownership:a) zero/low cash flow property (on day one) that pays down mortgage, but appreciates and cash flow builds as rents outpace costs (i.e. your Brooklyn example)b)  higher cash flow property (from day one), but lower appreciation and lower growth of cash flow as rents and costs grow with inflation only (e.g. a stable Midwest city perhaps)I would tend to agree that if you can get it "right" and can predict rent growth etc then property a) likely offers potentially higher returns.The difficulty I have is thinking about the risk embedded in making these predictions upfront coupled with the inherent illiquidity of property.

Granted they were all discounted reservations but it was during a slow period in Costa Rica and "Something was better than nothing."

By the time the property manager looks at an inquiry at 9am the next day, a self-managing owner has already accepted that booking reservation and sent the guests a personal welcome message.

I had autobook on AirBnB and cancelled the reservation immediately. 

I live in the reservation area and they are building homes left and right.

Realistically, you'd have repair expenses, capital expenditures reserves, allowances for vacancy/turnover, and property management fees (even if you are self-managing, account for that as if you were paying yourself a property management fee). 

Can you explain to me what your reserve requirements are?