My biggest mistake could fill a book with details, but I will summarize it here.

I know I'm going to have set backs at some point, but to mitigate that I'm asking questions here, and trying to get some pointers before I just jump off the cliff ;)But, to summarize what you're saying, you're advice is to stay away from MHs because the profit doesn't outweigh the work?

I was able to get very similar numbers to the author (hard to get the exact numbers because the author rounds up and then summarizes 3 properties on top of that) when I changed the years of ownership to as follows:Property A - owned 4 yearsProperty B - owned 2 years 3 yearsProperty C - owned 1 year 2 yearsSo I guess my question to the community is, has anyone else ran the numbers and noticed the discrepancy?

I like what @John Casmon summarizes, do as much homework on yourself as you do on what the coach is offering to see if a match. 

.: 114 pages (to date) summarized visually  

It pretty much summarizes the main points you need to think of as you make your first foray intro multi unit owning. http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2015/05/13...All this is to say, we did exactly what you're contemplating and purchased a multi unit via FHA and feel very fortunate to have done so.

Very succinctly summarizes many of the techniques I use myself when evaluating properties, the most critical of which is filtering out those listings of $1k/night from the owner that just rents out their unit 3-5x/year and blocks it off as unavailable the other 300 days/year.

Lastly, you should be underwriting at 10% Vacancy factor, not 5% (which is your best case).So to summarize, your total expenses including vacancy should be at 40% or more for underwriting based on the details you have provided thus far.

To summarize I lost my job as my employer once again lied about their written ability to sell mortgage notes for one of our largest banks.

The debate can be summarized as: For smaller properties trailing financials have many reasons to be wonky, but many believe it is a good signal of transparency and (as @Ben Leybovich points out) this higher variance is exactly why due diligence on the leases can be more important for smaller properties.Line between "commercial" and "residential" seems to be driven mainly by number of units (i.e. is it eligible for FHA loan), even though many commercial banks will underwrite loans on residential properties with fewer than 5 units (especially at larger loan sizes).Is 7809-7815 Franklin a hot deal?