You're playing a low percentage game relying on online leads.

What you'll quickly discover is that there are countless real estate investment strategies to choose from.

There are things I learned that I'd have to spend countless hours digging through YouTube and BiggerPockets to find something reliable.

Options have been mentioned above and you will find countless others throughout the BP community.  

I have had countless conversations with agents after a prolonged search for a new rental apartment about their line of work.. all of them either reportedly love it or hate it..

David that is the whole point if an investor wants to put in countless hours for 100 properties and get one for example and they make 30k then it might be worth their while.

I envisioned an aspiring wholesaler as one with a knack for negotiating, who would spend hundreds of hours self-teaching everything a fix and flip investor would have to know, plus direct marketing, before spending countless more hours networking for every aspect of the transaction (along with private money lenders for those properties that look ideal to fix and flip/fix and hold for his or her own portfolio).

Side note: This is a big difference between investors and non-investors: As investors, whenever we see someone succeed at investing, our natural tendency is to be curious about how they succeeded--we spend countless hours listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos about other investors' successes...sometimes, we even pay to learn about other peoples' successes (for instance, we buy books on the topic).

Then when things go to hell they walk away and pretend they had no involvement with the Property Manager even though they facilitated countless transactions positioning themselves as the owner. 

Chattanooga is bustling, Steady yearlong traffic, new housing developments going up everywhere you turn your head, countless jobs being opened in this region, new highway construction to widen our 3 lanes into 5 lanes, a new MiLB stadium in the works, and many many more things.