Alex the PERCEPTION is that mom and pop tenants think they are more valuable then they actually are.I do retail all day long but on the transaction side buying the centers with clients and then development myself.Tenant rep brokers is a very low income business.

@Raymond Mackay I'm by no means a sophisticated investor yet.

Just depends on your sophistication/risk tolerance and how good a deal.Good luck.

(Personally, I don't think this is the best approach for the small mom-and-pop investors because this assumes you consistently reinvest the returns earned into other deals almost immediately and I don't think most of us are sophisticated to do this.)Then if you are looking at a cash-on-cash return, when are you okay with it starting to pay out?

Of course as time goes on and you become a more sophisticated investor, there absolutely is a place for targeted seminars and coaching that will teach you about more advanced areas of REI such as syndication or non performing notes, but that isn't necessary for basic bread-and-butter single family rental investing.Kiyosaki does offer some helpful videos that are available for free on YouTube.  

Therefore I am going to ask some stupid or, not well thought questions to educate myself from the ground up.So, is there a connection between the Christmas Holidays and my perception that there aren't very many Wholesale-able houses on the market here in Reno?  

I didn't read anything about being accredited for Techvestor.Accredited investors are those individuals classified by the SEC asqualified to invest in complex or sophisticated types of securities.To become accredited certain criteria must be met, such as having an average yearly income over $200,000 or working in the financial industry.Sellers of unregistered securities are only allowed to sell to accredited investors, who are deemed financially sophisticated enough to bear the risks.Accredited investors are allowed to buy and invest in unregistered securities as long as they satisfy one (or more) requirements regarding income, net worth, asset size, governance status, or professional experience.Unregistered securities are considered inherently riskier because they lack the normal disclosures that come with SEC registration

Until we have intelligent systems that can evaluate perceptions, opinions and preferrences no system can compete.

Personally, I imagine that employee labor is just as expensive as sub-contractors if you're not tremendously optimized in your business.I think this is very true, in that when you hire employees you explicitly have to pay all the "loading" charges of those employees.Contractors, on the other hand, can frequently be retained for less due to competition among competing contractors, as well as lack of business sophistication on the part of many contractors in pricing their services (i.e. they don't necessarily understand/quantify and build in all of their hard/soft costs, a prime example being the true cost of longer-lived items like tools and vehicles).

To be blunt most in the small fry real estate world simply aren't sophisticated enough to account for risk in their dealings.