<prompt> Human: OP by uotherwiseyep is here but it is 3 years old.I see a lot of newprospective landlords on this subreddit, and also a lot of establishedexisting agents and investors, and sometimes there is a disconnect between what people dont know to ask, so to speak. So a couple of lessons from someone in-between specifically, a small-time landlord who hasnt quit his day job yet. Take it for what its worth...The easiest way to get started as a landlordinvestor, by far, is make your first home purchase be an investment home, such as a small multi-family. There are a million books, guides, web-forums on the details, but your first purchase is usually the easiest one to get favorable financing, and, for a bunch of reasons, it is much easier to build on a small portfolio of income-generating or flippable properties than to leverage your primary residence.For this reason and others, a lot of new landlords are starting with cheap starter rental units. Which is fine, in fact it might be the best way for people with little cash to get on a path to being rich, or at least a member of the investor-class.But here is a thing to be aware of and its neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just a thing: Cheap rental units have a tendency to lock you into cheap rental units. Let me explain:Lets say you buy a 4-unit apartment house in a marginal neighborhood for, say, 100,000 all examples will assume adequate state of repair, etc-- big assumptions, but eye on the ball please. Lets say the units rent for 500mo each. So 2,000 x 12 24,000 potential income on a 100k purchase-- thats some damn good returns, especially leveraged! Call that scenario X, where the gross rent is 24 of the purchase-price.Lets compare this to, say, a 1M 4-unit in a desirable location where the apartments rent for, say, 3,000mo, or 120,000 annually, or 12 of the purchase-price. Call that scenario ANow, either one of those will work in a strict cash-flow analysis of income minus PITI minus reasonable assumptions for vacancy etc. But why is one so much more expensive than other, on a percentage basis?A lot of real-estate agents dont really know what they are talking about when it comes to rental properties, and will tell you something hazy and unhelpful about equity or desirability or location or whatever. Some kind of gauzy fluff that sounds like wisdom handed down from on high to cover up the fact that they have no idea.A lot of landlord forums and websites will tell you that you need to make 2 of purchase price per month or something to make any money, and are short on details but long on personal experience and appeals to authority, with a healthy dose of ranting about tenants or something.Lets unpack some of this, and see if we can figure out why the market is willing to tolerate much lower percentage income on higher-end properties and locations and Im going to leave out speculativeemotional desirability stuff, because the institutional and commercial investors are not generally following the advice of web-forums or local realtors...In scenario X the cheap one, you are, statistically, going to be renting to lower-income people with shakier credit, inferior job-history, less education and career prospects, etc. They are less stable, likely to have higher rates of turnover and nonpayment, they will have more people per bedroom, and more socio-economic factors that will lead to more complexities related to maintenance, evictions, police activity, etc etc. But you can and should minimize that stuff by screening tenants carefully, and there are good people and good tenants who dont have much money. So thats part of it, but not really the biggest thing.The big thing, and the hard-edged, simple-math thing that rarely gets talked about, and that realtors and most investment books Ive read seem to gloss over completely is this:There are significant and ongoing fixed costs per unit that dont scale with purchase-price or rental income.It costs a certain amount of money per year to own a sink, or a toilet, or a refrigerator, or a driveway, or a door, etc, etc... those things break and wear out and need to be maintained and replaced.Maybe the high-end unit has nicer appliances and fixtures, but it doesnt cost anything close to 6x as much to own a stainless fridge as the cheap one in fact, the better stuff may have a comparable or even lower total cost of ownership, especially if you have better tenants.The roofing company doesnt charge less to work in the ghetto than they charge on Doctors Hill, and neither does the plumber, the water-company, the landscaper, or anyone else. It costs about the same to replace a toilet or paint a unit in Beverly Hills as it costs in East L.A., and those are fixed cash expenses, not a percentage-adjusted scale.What happens is that, over time, your 24,000 income stream that leaves, say, 14,000 per year after PITI, still has to cover a bunch of fixed cash costs that are not that much different on an apples-to-apples basis than, say, the 40,000 left over in Scenario A the expensive one. This has a huge effect on your actual net, and accounts for most of the reason why low-end landlords will tell you things like the aforementioned 2 rule.The net consequence of this is that, if you are making payments on cheap apartments, you are effectively forced to become a cheapskate: you buy the cheapest fixtures, you do the cheapest landscaping, you cover up old shingle construction with cheap vinyl siding, you let the driveway crack and crumble, etc, etc, because there simply isnt money left over to pay for pride of ownership.N.B., of course there are always ways to wrangle the numbers and do things yourself and seek out rehab grants and etc and so on-- Im talking apples-to-apples here.Alternately, in Scenario A, on an actual cash basis, you have a lot more flexibility to exercise judgement about how much you want to pocket, versus re-investing towards making or keeping your units desirable and attractive to the most stable and desirable tenants.I hope it is easy to see how scenario X, by comparison, can become a sort of cycle that is hard to break out of-- the lower your maintenance and appearance standards, the harder it is to be selective about tenants, and the more vacancy and non-payments you have to deal with.Last but definitely not least, is the cash-basis effect of equity growth on both scenarios. Even if you invest purely for income and not for equity, it is reasonable to assume that, long-term, rents and equity should roughly keep pace at least with inflation notwithstanding a whole bunch of things that can be discussed elsewhere in great detail.So again assuming apples-to-apples, a 10 rise in equity gives you 10,000 in scenario X which might cover a driveway re-surfacing for a four-unit, or 120k in Scenario A, which could afford a new driveway plus quite a bit of improvement and maybe even a good chunk of the downstroke on another million-dollar property...None of this is to say that buying cheap rental units is a bad idea. It might be the best decision you ever make, and its often the only way to enter the game in the first place. And plenty of people have gotten very rich in lower-income rentals.But its important and helpful to understand the ways in which real-estate is not like stocks. A house is not a substance like precious metal, its a thing , and buying one million-dollar thing is not the same as ten 100k things.Just make sure, when you run your numbers, that your assumptions reflect the ownership costs of all the toilets and windows and roofs and driveways and sinks and hinges and water heaters and so on. It may be that the cheaper units are still better than the premium ones, maybe much better. But only by using realistic fixed costs will you be able to compare apples to apples.Hope that helps.  <response>: In many markets there is a sweet spot for small investors, and that is in the 6-18 unit range. Less than 6 units can usually be managed part-time by an owner with a full-time job. They are much easier to finance, and can often be bought with much less overhead and lender scrutiny under the residential category. Over 18 units, the gross income usually justifies a full-time, live-in caretaker which allows a investor to manage a larger portfolio. Plus, getting top tier financing requires some sophistication and knowing the right broker etc. In between, a 10 unit building is much too big for a doctor to manage in her evenings and weekends, and much too small to be part of a large portfolio as the management overhead doesnt scale directly - a 50 unit building might be 25 more work to manage not caretake, manage than a 10 unit building, but with 5x the income. So, amateurs cant get financed and dont have time, and the deep pockets dont want the hassle. Very often this means there is much less interest in properties in between, and less interest means higher potential returns. 