The point is that most of the books and gurus out there will sell you the dream and get you hooked on buying into their programs without giving you all the nitty gritty details.You're running a business and must treat it that way. 

I use DealMachine, and I'm happy with it (I read the instructions you provide at the site, so I actually wasn't surprised by anything).

I'm working through the "picking a market" worksheet and workshop, and there are no clear instructions on how to find this. i've tried googling it, and referencing my data aggregators, but usually data goes back a year, 2-3 if I'm lucky. 

You are trying to say you will use the " investors" to fund community programs, that sounds like a charity because there is no earning on the investment.  

I recommend you research the local section 8 program. 

There used to be the one post people "the shills" saying how great XYZ's Mentorship program was.

The results of my students were about the same and they would create about $100,000 of increased net worth during the coaching program.

My friend spent $81,000 on marketing and told me he could not trace one sale to a lead generated by the program and that the program generated almost no leads anyway.  

I'm an investor and a licensed mortgage broker who has done fix and flips both using my home's equity and borrowing against the investment property.If you (1) have enough equity in your home to fully fund the deals, (2) don't mind tying that equity up for these deals vs saving it for a rainy day and (3) are ok linking the place you sleep with the success of the flips, this could make sense.We offer a ton of different fix and flip programs including putting 10% down on the purchase price and funding 100% of the rehab.

I am a software developer and I authored our current software, so interfacing to their API is not really a big issue, but I am not sure if anyone is familiar witth the process of using an API, If you arent familiar with the good ol nitty gritty programming, you arent going to get very far before pulling out all your hair.