In addition to everyone having different priorities and opinions, odds are that if someone is saying "XYZ is the absolute best market for investors!"

Hi Victor, I've used Fred from Integrity Home (link below) and have absolutely loved dealing with them. http://www.integrityhomebinghamton.com/If they don't have availability (not sure a day or two in advance, they would), I've blast emailed this group from the Binghamton MLS website to try to get a response/availability once before.

Willing to sacrifice a lot of my younger life to live a much more comfortable 60+ years  Hate to get all stoic - you are hoping for something that is absolutely no guarantee.

Carpet == dirt magnetMy view is unless absolutely necessary (and there are few cases of this, other than existing long term (e.g. 5+ yr) tenant who insists on replacing 15 yr+ carpet with... carpet) don't do carpet.

Then, you can absolutely draft a new lease for the tenants to sign and collect the additional money to ensure you have an adequate security deposit.

Thanks, @Neal Collins, you're absolutely right: I'll need to do a lot of homework on the mortgages, taxes, potential fees etc. for any given property.Another big reason I'm doing this is that there are a lot of attractive reasons to go from having an external office for my business (which is currently the case) to having an in-home office that would be tax deductible and essentially give me a discount on my house payment.However, another consideration that I must be careful of is that with seller-financing, a seller can sell the house as-is with possibly a huge number of repairs/some deeply fundamental repair needed.

To your bank account question - yes, absolutely.  

Once you get into multi family though, you absolutely need it. 

However in dollar terms that comes to an absolute amount of $15k which is quite a discount to listed price

Most of these developments are designed in absolutely disgusting ways.