Our meetings are fun, engaging, and informative.About the meeting:Whether you have a little or a lot of money to lend, or you borrow money, you don't want to make costly mistakes!

I just want to learn from this so I in the future I can decide if it’s wise to juggle multiple agents at once or maybe create a different system to choose one: I don't mean to pile on, but I can pretty much guarantee you that you are not getting a rock-star agent.A rock star agent would be so busy with all the referrals and existing clients that the last thing he/she would need to do would be to encourage lying and also engage in unethical behavior to obtain an out of state client.Rest assured, when a tough situation arises, this agent will lie to you as well.

@Michael Gabin Hi Michael,It sounds like you are getting ready to jump and that you have already done a good deal of legwork - people have already identified the key categories: Single Family Homes, Multi-Familys 1-4 for residential investments and 5+ for commercial, Retail property and commercial properties - and then there are the specialist areas like Hotels and Mobile Home Parks etc.Some general guidelines are:Decide on your ultimate income requirement per month or per year - tax benefits and appreciation are often factored into these calculations but if you want somewhere to start that would be a good place.Once you've done that you can then start to work on the cash-flow per unit - a good rule of thumb is $200-$400+ for a SFR and $100-200+ for a unit in a multi-family ( that's Cash flow after expenses)If you plan to diversify within your Real Estate portfolio then you would be looking at a mixture of those cash-flows to make your required incomeThat leads you to think about how you would like to manage the properties - do you want to engage management or manage yourself - this is another piece of the puzzle to decide so you can get startedOnce you've got a clearer idea of the overall shape then you would decide about the best way to organise the investments in terms of capital outlay...Basically you would either;Pay cash outright - NOT a great plan financially probably don't need to go into that!

Alternatively, you can engage a CPA to do this research for you.

How to engage a contractor to help with you project?

I am also engaged in a couple of ground up townhome development)s.

My top priorities are always looking into any unmentioned pets or them engaging in any illegal activity.

We are building to HUD standards now so we do not have any issues with design review when we engage.  

However, I have no regrets and new learnings to engage in future deals and know what makes an investment good.

Also, your "rules of engagement" for your hired help should be clear with them, and that is that they are there to address a particular issue and nothing else, without your prior approval.