I lead our DST due diligence within our RIA, and what you are experiencing is unfortunate and rare if you have the right sponsor.

However, if you're a W2 high income earner or business owner, I can't imagine it makes any sense to flip houses, mail mass post cards, wholesale, or build lead gen websites with the value of your time being better spent other places (such as learning about real estate and increasing your income through proven means), such as at your 9-5pm or growing your business, and your real estate is a long term process and you don't need "home run" deals to qualify or make it work.

This also leads owners to ASSUME simpler is better when it comes to management contracts.

You could do your work for free and it would still be too much for them because you don't do things the way they believe is right.I recommend developing owner-screening criteria to make sure you bring on the right folks and the right properties. 

My friend spent $81,000 on marketing and told me he could not trace one sale to a lead generated by the program and that the program generated almost no leads anyway.  

From day one I treated my involvement in real estate as a real business.This means, I had an advertising budget, a lead generating and follow up process, a back end process and money source and above all an experienced mentor.  

Quote from @Hector Romero: Hello all, I am new to the community as well as being the lead in real estate investments.My sister and I currently hold 3 properties next to each other in Riverside County, California (we'd like to get them in an LLC but we're unsure how that may affect financing them).

The experience was really bad as I was getting 1-2 year old leads to cold call that I knew had a 0% success rate and I do much better generating leads organically on my own.

We are frequent users of the Rental Property Calculator and have found a few promising leads thus far but also know that is just the beginning of the process.

Feel free to browse my old cringe posts as proof lol.