The rest is all noise level.  

My advice is: If you are managing from a distance, you need someone with a high level of accountability and close proximity to care for your assets.  

Meeting many different people that are on many different levels in their real estate journey.

Unless you find an attorney that exclusively practices in this area, they won't have that level of knowledge.  

How are you going to learn about other markets without going there or trusting others?

I will say there is always some type level of risk when investing in real estate though

We hired another contractor (a church friend of a realtor that we'd used in the past and we trust this realtor 100%) and paid him $15,000 to start the same project and everything went great; he completed demolition, installed the new roof, and got some permits (roof permit, electrical, and plumbing).

One idea I have is to "shadow" a real estate investor (although I am not entirely sure how to go about asking for / finding this kind of opportunity), but I am wondering if anyone has insight into other ways to gain a comparable level of experience.If anyone has insight into any or all of these topics, I would greatly appreciate the feedback.

I am looking for the agreement that states the terms of payment and details of communications to ensure I am getting paid and the person told me that is based on verbal communications of trust between the two.

I'm basically at water level on this, and I don't know that other investors could make this cashflow any more than I could without me selling at a huge loss.