Create some.With your property being an hour from you, try to do some networking to find good vendors now rather than when you really need them, in a hurry, on a Sunday morning.Best of luck growing your empire!

I will address your points in the order you specified:1) It's hard to get heavy returns right away, most of the best passive empires are built slowly. $35k/mo is a very high cost of living, and although there may be good reasons for this high cost, I would recommend looking at areas where you can cut expenses out of your life.

I want to use real estate as a way to get back to that.I'm looking to connect with other real estate investors in the Inland Empire/High Desert(Riverside, San Bernardino County) area to learn more about and get involved in wholesaling, flipping, and buy and hold properties.

you won't need info on a 1031 exc. until you have an empire, and want to sell out and invest elsewhere.

That property is now worth about 50% more than we paid for it back then (we bought it for upper-$400k's, and it's worth mid-$700k's now), so if anyone bought it at the current value, they'd be losing money.I agree with the suggestion of looking at the Inland Empire, I think you can probably get better returns there. 

Two questions looking back or forward for some, would you rather build you empire slowly or take the bigger risk out of the gate and try to hit a big score? 

I hope to build a real estate empire so I can leave my job, retire in the country in a big ranch home, and raise a couple of Clydesdales even though I don't have any experience in that either. 

Now, I am growing that business into an empire by re-investing the dividends from the business I already have.  

Newbie trying to get into investing, located in the inland empire area.

Boy is it fun to bring back a thread like this from the dead - look back over the last twelve months and see that rents popped something like 20% in the Inland Empire  - people got both cash flow and a whole lotta appreciation.As for the next twelve months - who knows. . .