Again, this depends on your risk appetite.

I am looking to meet with people with the same hungry appetite for success and growth and who are willing to share with me their experiences of their investment journeys. 

However, I feel AJ's book is a little light on specifics, jumbled, and really a marketing tool to entice you to invest in his coaching.Stacy Rossetti is someone I recently stumbled across and she seems very credible: https://www.youtube.com/channe...She has a lot of free videos to whet your appetite, then she offers coaching, analysis tools, and can even help you locate your first facility.

We had a meeting with a smaller local bank a couple months ago and their VP on the commercial side stated that they had an appetite for nearly anything we wanted to get into EXCEPT Temple student rentals.

Doesn't seem like there is a big appetite in the US to open borders to the EU so I doubt the reciprocal will be happening soon, but call me bearish! 

Yes, sometimes you retrade and sometimes you find something and need to back out, but if you're working with realtors and only close 1/3 of the deals you get accepted, well, you are not going to be high on their list.When we're out making offers on REO's, we get about 10% of our offers accepted and we close on probably 90% (that doesn't include one's we immediately drop, say if we get two accepted on the same day but only have the appetite to buy one).

For instance, maybe you discover that the rents have not gone up in the past few years and/or they have been deliberately suppressed, for whatever reason.

Anyone have a good realtor in SA that caters to investors, or at the very least, has an appetite for working with an investor?

Because rates have been suppressed for 10 years, investors have lost the ability to accurately assess risk, and investments have been pursued that otherwise may not have. 

It would be good to strike up a conversation there, and see whether their appetite for investment mortgages has improved since my last drop in.