Newer than a newbie. Looking for advice!

[Stephen Rodriguez]

Hello everyone! I'm very new to this forum but I already love it. I have been bouncing around the idea of property investment for quite some time now. I'm looking mostly into buy and hold. I don't have any experience fixing up houses, but I really want to get into buying properties, renting them out over time and selling them when the market is right. I have a couple of things I need specific advice on. 1. First of all, where the heck do I even start? I would like to know stories of my fellow investors' first buys. They can be success stories or failure stories. Did you self finance? How much did your first buy cost? How long did it take you to find renters/sell? What went wrong/right? I'd like to get a good feel of either how much i need to save or how much I need to finance to start, and what to look for. 2. What are some things I should look into as far as cost, overhead, market area, etc? 3. What types of things do you run into with property management? 4. Is there anything that you didn't take into account when you first started that you definitely should have?