I'm trying to decide whether I can afford to become a landlord of small rental properties, primarily townhomes/condos. I don't however, know how to calculate the cashflow and have no idea what type of interest rates to expect from a mortgage on an investment property. If you could help me get started, I'd be thrilled. Thanks.

Entire books have been written on this... so best I can do here is give you the short version:

Buy a 2-unit place where one side is big enough for you. LIve there and manage it and rent the other part out: That will cover more than half your mortgage payment and maybe even 75-95% of it.

Try it that way a year and you will learn more than you can imagine. You'll either love it and buy a lot of rental properties or hate it and stay away from the business.

... just my 1.5 cents worth :)

If you have to borrow money to buy it, expect to make no money on the property basically.

But you take the cost of the property payments, and mostly the payments will depend on your credit, so you can est that 7 to 10 percent depends on your credit.

So you have the house payment, you have the yearly taxes, you have house insurance. Next you can almost expect to have it vacate about 5 to 15 percent of the time. Next you have to figure in costs of posible eviction, and knowing you can go three to four months with no payments while you are evicting and fixing the house back up.