Cash in your equity using a public auction, assign your position in the property.Offer a lease with an option to purchase with right of possession.Offer a straight option to purchase at an agreed price to take place sometime in the future. w/right of possession.Offer at a higher price with seller financing with a delayed settlement with right of possession.

However, determining a market CAP rate for your building isn't necessarily super straight forward because of the various factors listed above which take a more detailed and experienced approach.

Only you can figure out if you are in that rare company and need to jump straight into multifamily syndication. 

If you use typical straight line depreciation, normally you will offset all of you cash flow. 

Then, you can rinse and repeat or just stay in that first house hack and start buying straight investment properties (or even start flipping).

But I definitely want to learn the market better and would love to get into buy and holds in Houston at some point.To answer your question more straight forward, most likely I would start off investing in Iowa City, because I know the area better.

There are a few direct DSTs that can be acquired straight from the operator/syndicator that have no 3rd party fees. 

You can remove a link and get a better picture of the seller going straight to their agent.Joseph is correct. 

I jumped straight into multifamily in order to have an easier time finding a positive cash flowing property.

Even hard money and private lenders will require the borrower to have cash in the deal, assuming you are talking about flipping/rehabbing and not straight wholesaling.If you only intend on wholesaling, you only need enough for a handful of earnest deposits to be sitting out at any given time, and likely won't ever need a lender, since you will never be purchasing the properties.