My wife and I will be purchasing our first investment property in Fall of '26 in on the Gulf Coast of FL.

Pull permits on every property before you fall in love with the numbers.You've got the capital and the attitude.

I'm in Sioux Falls.

Its good we have that to fall back on. 

That matters more than picking the perfect neighborhood.Zillow + DealCheck is fine for screening, but don't fall in love with the tool.

Jamie Dimon recently pulled back the curtain on how AI is actually being used inside JPMorgan Chase.Risk analysis, fraud detection, marketing, underwriting, note-taking, ad generation, error reporting, and reducing operational mistakes.In total, the bank already has 600 AI use cases, and Dimon says 50 of them fall into the “important” category.His philosophy on deploying the technology is straightforward:“If we could use it to do something better, faster, quicker, cheaper, we are going to do it.”That sentence explains how nearly every major company will approach AI.Dimon also acknowledged something most CEOs rarely say publicly.

After renovations, I will begin marketing and working on getting them filled before the next fall semester but then should I just pay a property manager or use RentRedi and the other software tools and self manage. 

The only thing that is keeping my interest there is the fact they didn't let rent fall behind and kept up with paying rent.

I spend a lot of time running numbers on small multifamily deals (mostly 2–4 units in PA and NJ), and one thing I’ve noticed is that many deals look great at first glance but start to fall apart once you run them through realistic financing assumptions.One quick thing I’ve found helpful is checking the DSCR early before getting too deep into the analysis.A lot of deals get underwritten assuming current rents and current taxes, but once you account for things like tax reassessments, vacancy, and realistic operating expenses, the ratio can end up much lower than expected.I’ve seen situations where a deal looked like it would cash flow comfortably, but once the numbers were adjusted the DSCR ended up below lender minimums.It doesn’t necessarily mean the deal is bad, but it can change how it needs to be structured.Sanity-checking the financing side early helps avoid spending a lot of time analyzing deals that ultimately won’t fit within typical lending guidelines.Would be interested to hear how others here quickly determine whether a deal will actually finance before getting too far into the numbers.

Think fall gold will see a rally.