@Whitney Hill - Applying rent towards the purchase price conflicts with the Dodd Frank Consumer Protection Act, but that does not apply to the option fee.

Link to complaint formhttp://www.dbo.ca.gov/Consumers/consumer_services....They do business under 2 licenses, below is the most current.

I believe real estate investing is a great avenue for myself and I welcome how much it has consumed me.  

I pay the pool guy $70 a month to keep it pristine and it can consume some $$$ in gas.

It will consume too much of your time for very little money.

Some consumer sites have better search functions and are certainly improving their services on a regular bases.It all depends on what you are looking for.

I know this topic has a lot of forum questions dedicated to it already, but my go-to resources direct mail list resources seem to be set-up differently then in the past.I have used Reonomy and List Source previously for direct mail leads with good enough results that I'd use them again, however Reonomy has just recently been forcing an annual contract instead of monthly which is WAY too costly for what I need, and List Source has split up the commercial properties list differently then the last time I used them and almost all of them are listed in "Commercial: miscellaneous" with every other property types, and I have tried filtering differently with no positive results.My goal is to get "true ownership information"(Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers of people who own LLCs & INCs), but for now this is a one time thing, so I don't need an annual contract, and I don't want to pay thousands for Co-Star for an entire year or something.I do have TLO, however pulling multiple owner's information is very time consuming, so I'd like to do this only for a few select properties.Long story short, I'd settle for any ownership information whether it's company data or not, but I'd like to do a one time deal and get 500-1000 leads.

True, I'd avoided bad consumer debt, worked on my 401K, and did some saving, but I never started building a snowball toward wealth and freedom from a cubicle.

I've purchased most of my homes  with modest appreciation.  

It used to be that only the 400K+ houses sat on the market for months but now I see that more modestly priced homes are sitting longer and houses are coming on the market for lower asking prices than we would have seen a year or two ago.