Wear out a pair of shoes, walk and talk those areas and introduce yourself.All you young'ns out there are getting too caught up in technology, real deals in your area are made with people, again, get face to face.Analysis has a place in RE, but you can get bogged down in irrelevant data.

Good to see that more and more technologies are being developed to help the real estate community.

I currently work a 9 to 5 job in the field of information technology but the eventual goal is to use real estate investing to gain financial independence.

Here are some great books that I highly recommend that I've read in the past year in no particular order: 1- The Magic of Thinking Big (the size of your belief = the size of your success) 2- The 4 Hour Week - Tim Ferriss (productivity and leveraging technology and 80/20 rule) 3- Eat that frog - Brian Tracy (productivity, focusing on 80/20 rule) 4- Lean Startup Method (bootstrapping and adaptive learning) 5- How to Win Friends and Influence People (classic on working with people) Enjoy.

I also own a call center business and am involved with creating the technology to make the business work.

Due to the era that we live in, with technology and the internet, you can run 90% of your business from home which means being able to use communication tools like the phone to communicate with sellers and email to exchange documents.The key is to know the deal and ask a lot of questions and let the seller talk.

On second thought, the guy who invented the fax machine died (as have hundreds of millions of other people who have used fax machines), so I'd recommend steering clear of that technology.

***PS Hope this qualifies for the "Real Estate Technology" section and won't be put into the Marketplace again...

It's not much work to create and submit an offer with the technology these days but it's still their time.

That's a pretty simple and good use of technology.