When you say, "trying to cook something up", what are you trying to use as your ingredients? 

Gaining specialized knowledge, and taking action are mandatory ingredients to being successful.

Title Company and Real Estate attorney are the key ingredients I was missing. 

@Eric Wills Networking is one of the key ingredients to success.

Convenience store purchases vs growing ingredients in your garden or buying the ingredients and cooking yourself.What type of investor do you want to be? 

The number one "ingredient", is eliminating emotion from the equation.

Vacancies and similar are ingredients to the NOI.

Cars are made with soy ingredients on plastic wiring.

Forbes magazine and others are hyping it up as if they just discovered a gold mine and knew some secret ingredient.

Things will take longer, costs will run higher, and unless you're one of the few extremely lucky ones first time out of the gate, this has all the ingredients of a disaster or at best a mediocre deal that will leave you disillusioned with the wealth-building power of real estate.Tell us more about what you're doing, what market you're in, and why you think hard money is your only choice.