The FF rates in my zipcode are higher than I expected and their quality is less than what I'm bringing online! 

An instructor can make it better, but most are online now anyway.

You don’t even have to attend some conferences, some will publish a list of their speakers and/or attendees and you could simply reach out directly after researching their firms online.

But this was late 90s so way before on line stuff had taken off.

Again, my issue is… I have built a ton of equity in a property that currently has few options for accessing the equity and that bothers me because I am still in growth mode and I realize the potential that that equity has for me and my business here in the states. 

If you want to understand 5-year outlook, I'd look for multifamily construction data in your area to understand what level of new units is and will be coming online in the near future. 

For contact management like that its awesome to search for specific types of people and locations or just data like "how long does it take to foreclose in texas".We have some other use cases as well that we use to track not only ours but competitors results online and learning what does and does not work for different aspects of the business.

I'm exploring ways to access equity without selling.

I see no value in it for evaluation.Realestate.com has always been a good site for accessing properties, but they do a poor job of evaluation. 

The way I'm looking at it, if my spouse and I only do employer matching for the 10 years we would have more than enough in there and still 10 years out from being able to access it.I do plan on doing 401k loans for deals if the numbers check out, and I've considered rolling over some of our 401ks into roth IRAs to access our contributions but we'd have to pay taxes out of pocket (a big hit to cash flow) and we couldn't touch it for 5 years.