Great to have you here and love your openness to learning — that’s going to take you far in real estate.One thing I wish I had known earlier: don’t chase perfect deals, chase repeatable ones.

Get really good at running flip numbers (doesn't have to be perfect, just conservative + buffers) 5.

Since you’re new, focus first on learning how to analyze deals and understand what a solid investment looks like—Brandon Turner’s The Book on Rental Property Investing and David Greene’s Long-Distance Real Estate Investing are great places to start, and both align perfectly with what’s working in markets like Memphis right now.

They require owner-occupancy (you must live in one unit as your primary residence), but you may be able to combine it with down payment assistance (DPA) programs to help cover your 3.5% down payment and possibly closing costs.USDA Multifamily loans – sometimes offer 100% financing in rural areas, perfect if hard money lenders aren’t available.DSCR loans – lenders evaluate the property’s cash flow rather than your experience, so first-time investors can sometimes still qualify ( depending on your credit worthiness and cash on hand.These options can sometimes work when hard money lenders won’t, especially for someone in your situation with a property that has strong comps.

However, running out of capital to invest is not the perfect argument it's crafted to be since the reason we all went into real estate as an asset class to begin with was that we could always partner with banks to fund our deals.The magic of only coming up with a fraction of the cost ensures you are always going into any deal with a partner, except the bank is always the passive partner that is never going to need a K-1 or an offering memorandum.

A market "crash" provides the perfect "need" for inflation. 

I haven't found a property yet because I am perfecting my strategy with them, but there have been a lot of potential ones.

A couple of other things I’ve found valuable to look at are:Track record through cycles (how they’ve managed deals in both good and bad markets).Transparency and reporting (how proactive they are with communication, especially when things aren’t going perfectly).Alignment of interests (skin in the game, fee structure, co-investment).In my experience, those have been big predictors of how well a sponsor actually delivers in the long run.

I’m not perfect, but I’m hungry to keep learning, improving, and building sustainable success.Right now, my biggest limitation is capital.

The trap with the 2018-2023 period of time is, it was a perfect storm for the STR investment class.