I’d rather dollar cost average and buy every year in good times a bad times.

For example let's say you have an older home with plaster walls, your contractor will replace them with drywall at a fraction of the cost but the insurance covers the cost to replace with plaster which could be thousands of dollars more.

You'll also find some clients that like to juice the commission on performance metrics, similar to what you posted, but that is also relatively rare as most owners feel if they're paying you north of $300,000, you should just try to get top dollar with strong terms.

Driving for dollars" is another way to find properties. 

https://www.har.com/content/department/mlsHouston Real Estate Highlights in September, 2024:-Single-family home sales increased 1.7 percent year-over-year;-Days on Market (DOM) for single-family homes went from 45 to 51 days;-Total property sales were down 3.3 percent with 8,228 units sold;-Total dollar volume was statistically flat at $3.3 billion;-The single-family median price was up 1.1 percent to $335,000;-The single-family average price edged up by 0.3 percent to $415,435; -Single-family home months of inventory registered a 4.4-months supply, up from 3.4 months last September.

The second year we started questioning where our cash flow was and eventually discovered they had been embezzling 10s of thousands of dollars from us during the 2 years we’d owned the properties.

I am a state employee contributing 10% of my pre tax dollars to a 457b and I contribute 7.25% to a state retirement plan - no employer match.After a little research, I'm learning some early real estate investors with a W-2 job do not contribute to a retirement plan if there is not a company match, but instead put their money toward real estate investing. 

If you need more than a couple hundred dollars and you keep the lions share of your money in here like you are supposed to..GOOD LUCK! 

One of them is absolutely crushing it—she’s always hunting for leads, making calls, driving for dollars, and more.

I can’t keep track of the number of  people I come across on bigger pockets who feel the need to create entity structures more complexed than my former employer that owned a hotel portfolio valued over a billion dollars.