The difference is night and day between using someone you find online or in a search vs a personal referral. 

Zillow and online county property records for sale prices.   

I am looking to create content online to document my journey, educate others, and market.

Join local meetups or online groups (here on BiggerPockets, Meetup.com, other other local REIA are the good ones).

The person who gave me a demonstration mentioned that by using it, listings were much better ranked on Airbnb (he emphasized that the listing updates every night, which is good for the algorithm).

Offered $20k over asking within a week of it coming online.

It will take a lot of evenings, nights, and weekends of sacrifice and hard work. 

You can also check their reviews online at Google, Facebook, or Yelp.

Keep doing what you're doing with networking, and just keep showing up — in person or online.

I understand equity and cash-flow are related, but what I mean is that I don't need the cash flow right now as much as I'd like to build a strong portfolio that can cash flow even more later on.I've owned a single-family rental for 4 years, but on mulitple fronts I felt like I've done a poor job self-managing it, so this Fall I picked up the Turners' book on managing rentals and that's what led me here to Bigger Pockets online.