My husband and I started investing in Baltimore County, MD a little over a year ago.  We purchased our first property for $58,000.  We were able to rehab the property for $35K.  We started the rehab with the intention to sell it, but after studying the market several times, we decided to hold onto it and rent it.  We probably could have saved about $5-8K in rehab costs if we hadn't had renovated it with a resell in mind.  Either way, we managed to rent it for $1650/month with a Section 8 tenant.  We refinanced the property after acquiring a tenant, since we had purchased the property using a hard money lender.  The house appraised for $148K and after paying off the hard money lender and doing a cash out refinance, we were able to get back the $35K we spent on the rehab!  We have since been able to purchase 5 additional houses using the same model.  Our last property we were able to buy CASH to avoid the hard money fees.  All of our properties rent for an average of $1600/month.  We are continuing to look for buy and hold properties, but now we are interested in trying a flip.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated as we venture into our first flip!