Went down that road, so just a heads up, YMMV...DYODD.

A lot of people talk about how rental property is this unlimited spigot of cash, and the only way to prepare for retirement, so on and so forth. Sometimes they won't shut up about it. But what they don't tell you is there is no real money in it for the retail investor or just your regular Joe.

There is zero money in a simple profit = rent - expenses. Taxes, trades, insurance, management, note...that all burns into it, and that's not even including unexpected expenses like any legal issues or even a tree falling over into something.

You have to understand that the only money in rental property is the cash flow. The high speed guys use that flow to leverage their debt to the hilt to always getting more properties, but there is very little left in the way of cash accumulation. It's a constant, full time job, and a good percentage those properties that you buy need work. It's the "all the work, none of the cash" part of house flipping. You either do it yourself, or you pay the trades to do it. If you are a one off guy, you will be paying full retail for those services. You're going to get creamed by that in the long run.

So there is money, eventually, in the equity you are building, but it's going to be REAL slow if you're starting from a small base, and you can get burned real quick by a slowing hosusing market when you are looking to unload. If interest rates spike, that disrupts your program. Insurance spike will wreck you program. Angry local municipalities will wreck your program. The cash flow part is a trickle, and it's only at the very end, with dozens of properties (at least), that it starts to amount to anything.

The other part that people don't talk about is they use a LOT of "tax harvesting", which is the only place that there is any money saved, and it's not even real money. Everything runs at a loss so you can deduct everything, and save on taxes. Without this, there would be very little in the way of rental property. I'm not going to go into detail on this, but without the tax game, rental property is a giant suckhole of losses.

You can't play the leverage game with one or two properties. You'll lose a pile of cash becaue there is no short term money in rent, and you'll just wind up selling at a discount to some guy playing the leverage game. Tenants are a pain, and management companies (the good ones) cost money, and that's just making the cash situation worse. The only way a one or two property setup makes sense is if you are holding the properties to benefit from a spike in housing prices, and that game carries it's own risk and has holding costs.

Even one or two properties is a hassle, something is always wrong, and there is very little in the way of margin to cover any issues.

If you want to do it to dip your toe in to try it out, that's fine, nothing wrong with that, and maybe it will lead to something. But getting to the end where the money is found is basically a second full time job. Rental isn't the ATM that the people on landlord/investing forums claim it is, not by a long shot, and I suspect a lot of the rental noise is fluffled up by those looking to profit from amateur landlords.

You HAVE to have competent legal advice, and at a minimum an LLC to put some distance between you an an angry tenant, and even that might not help.

My 0.02.