As a  young married couple with decent income, we seem to be in an ideal position to start out investing fairly early, it is only a matter of getting real estate education and making deals happen.I have to confess, I have been a member of BP for about a year now.

You mentioned that is not an ideal situation.

For example, guest related inquiries can be in a Slack channel called frontdesk which has a slack email address, so you can auto-forward any of those to that channel's email address and they post there. 

Current tenant may be willing to owner finance since the payment to me would be only slightly more.How would I deal with the pitfalls of the mortgage company calling the loan, insurance, taxes, etc?

State refund check is a decent size, but going straight to emergency savings (which I feel is not bolstered enough if things were to ever go sideways).I'm in this weird limbo with wanting to accelerate debt payoffs AND save a good amount for a venture into RE AND bolster emergency money (like 6+ months of living expenses saved...ideally 9-12 months would be nice). 

He has debt issues to the tune of about $70K in auto and other revolving loans. 

I'm 28 and thinking of buying a triplex that was built in 1910, I would ideally hold this property for the next 15-20 years.

Comparable zoning in Seattle would only allow for a Pep Boys type auto use, no service or maintenance. 

In most markets/cases, the ideal investments are C properties in B areas.

There are some great online resource that catch listings 24-48 hours after they are posted but the best thing todo is find a realtor and ask them to set up an auto-email for you particularly if you're in an area that has a strong market you don't want to be behind of the competition.