Crazy story Jake and thank you for sharing it with the community.

I'm excited for the opportunity to be apart of the community with BP, I reside in the state of Virginia and started my investment journey many years ago at 22 doing fix and flips, I stopped when the market crashed in 2007/2008 and didn't like the way the market looked and I left the investing world, I became a mortgage loan officer, and then processor and later underwriter and learned the backend of the conventional lending world.

I'm going to try to post snippets of things I've learned this past year as a way of paying it forward and gratitude for all I've learned and keep learning via this community.

Just wondering if anybody is part of a house flipping performance coaching program? I know the basics of house flipping already and I flip in the Bay Area.Please don't comment here and say that coaches and etc are sca...

Quote from @Remy Piazza: Hi BP community. 

:) Love this community!

Remember, the real estate community is a great resource for support and guidance along the way.Good luck!

Hi Derek, welcome to the community!

Hey Bigger Pockets community, I'm just starting out in Step 1 (get educated) on what I want to become a successful career in real estate investment.I also currently run an e-commerce business that is currently completely online, but would benefit from having a brick & mortar storefront, and I had an idea that maybe using the investment capital I'm looking to allocate into real estate into a commercial property my business can operate out of until I decide to sell the property in or rent it out to another business.I am obviously very naive when it comes to the complexity of any good real estate deal (especially commercial VS residential), but I'm hoping to spend as much time learning from everyone here who is on their journey as well.My main concern with the idea of buying commercial to operate my business out of it that I might struggle to rent it out afterwards and that there may likely be depreciation in the commercial real estate market over the next 5 years.I understand there is a lot of nuance depending on the local market but I'm guessing commercial is even less of a "safe" bet than finding a solid residential deal to leverage in some way.

As the 3rd largest MSA in the country it's hard to generalize the Chicago market as it's actually over 100 different submarkets when counting the 78 communities in Chicago property and then adding in the various suburbs, including in and around Naperville.