It's important to always remember this when trying to extract value out of a realtor, if they can provide any

I call cashflow income generated by the asset.You can refinance an amount less than your down payment, equal to your down payment, or more than your down payment...or you can consider your down payment left in the property (the equity created) and the refinance is extracting the value added from rehab (profit). 

It's simple really.If going to a seminar and paying money will take MOST of your net worth then don't do it.People think these classes are the silver bullet to getting rich.Then they get mad when it doesn't happen and they are almost broke.I would say in that case KEEP YOUR MONEY and do mailers for leads and read FREE material in books and on the internet.Find local investors you can learn from where you want to do business.If you are making money at substantial rates and want to pay for a seminar then it won't be the end of the world for you if it doesn't pan out.It's no secret that many companies will get people at the seminars to "source deals" for them to partner on and use the fees from seminars to buy more properties and get richer.It is NOT for the benefit of those attending the seminar.I do not know this company and I am speaking in generalities.You can find these systems for 30 cents on the dollar usually selling for resale on Craigslist,Ebay,etc.When I bought a broker course on generating listings first getting into real estate the regular price was 997.00.I went in with another broker and bought a used one from the same year on Ebay for 300 so we paid 150 apiece.A year later I resold it once extracting all info for 250 to another broker.So if you are great at and enjoy sourcing information you can do it for cheap or almost free.If you want it in a nice little package you will pay heavily for it.A common tactic of seminars is to throw almost all the "meat" out there and then when you buy the course it just resays about 80 percent of what was already said with a lot of fluff thrown in.

With a C Corp, you have to extract the capital eventually, and the double taxation is a killer, even with the lower flat 21% fed rate at the entity level. 

Our family home is paid off, so my plan was to use any equity we can extract from that as working capital for acquiring properties.

And that business can certainly be RE -- whether development, rentals, notes, etc, if you have a trusted management team running the business, there are generally ways you can completely extract yourself from the business.Sure, the business could fail, the stock could tank, and you could be left without financial independence, but again, that can happen with govenrment-backed interest-bearing securities as well.

I'm planning on going to the courthouse to extract some probate leads myself.

As with all licensing laws, it is a tool for the government to extract fees.

If you have access to a public website and need to ‘capture’ the data from it to create your database or spreadsheet for your leads (assuming your county doesn’t already offer the information in a spreadsheet format), the keywords you need to learn are “data mining,” “screen scraping”, and “data extraction” (I had never heard of either term to describe capturing info from a website until I went to craigslist and found someone under the ‘services’ section who offered IT services….and explained what I needed.

So when you are out and see a place you can instantly extract the sale info on the property run the numbers for you instead of going and using your own your spreadsheets etc.