Brokering or Wholesaling Notes

[Megan Randolph]

Hi so I'm somewhat new to the real estate investing world. I have been soaking up as much information as I can from different outlets trying to decided what avenue to pursue and originally I had thought buy and holds seemed the most viable for me. But then I found out about note investing and it's been very intriguing to me. It seems like exactly the kind of passively active investment I have been looking for. 

However, I'm still young (25 as of next week) and haven't had time to build up a lot of capital yet. From my understanding it's much more difficult to leverage notes and use OPM to buy them than it is with hard real estate. So, I'm going to go ahead and assume I can't just jump right in and start buying when I'm barely going to be able to afford 1-2 steeply discounted notes.

Something I have seen mentioned but can't find much information on, is the idea of wholesaling or bird dogging notes same as you would hard real estate. 

Does anyone have any good information on the viability of this? Does it fall under the same guidelines as real property, and if I want to pursue that, should I start by getting a real estate license to protect me legally? Would I have to get a license in each state that I'm buying notes from if that's the case? And does anyone know an active note broker that has been able to do this successfully?