Welcome to BP.I am sure you will find all of the resources necessary to ensure that you will never have to live under a bridge as a result of bad real estate investment decisions.I have found the brain power here to be awesome and sharing culture to be genuine.My personal story is that I have been a landlord & property "flipper" for more than 30 years.I also invest in real estate "paper"...ie.

One investor group I'm associated with owned an apartment building in Memphis recently and the deal went South because a culture of non-payers developed on the property (the tenants).  

The culture here is different than other brokerages, and there's a tremendous amount of internal support, especially for new people.

Thanks @Pyrrha Rivers, Vietnam is an amazing place :)Its also incredibly cheap to travel all over Asia from here, so I'm have a really good time building up a business here, learning the culture, and especially eating all the food!

They know law, but they don't have any real-life experience and they are deeply entrenched in a risk-averse industry culture.  

I graduated from the University of New Mexico many years ago (back in 1999), and although I have not lived in Albuquerque since, I still maintain a sense of New Mexico being a second "home" all this time, due both to my geographic knowledge of the region and an appreciation and love of the culture and landscape.   

What's driving up the prices in Flushing is as much cultural as it is the dense population.

I have a desire to support uplifting/encouraging art in Houston, for the art (music, performing arts, visual arts) is the heartbeat of the culture of a city, help propel the local church I am a part of to new levels of influence and ability to help (they have a large prison and drug addict ministry), and to provide future employment/contract work that can help establish good character and personal development in said employees.Real Estate/Business has the potential to impact on a city level what would be nearly impossible to do in the position of a W2 salary, even at higher levels in the corporate ladder IMO.This impact potential gets me absolutely jazzed.And so since November I have devoured books, burned through podcasts, employed my excel and access skillz, joined a local REI club, met up with local investors, read numerous BP threads/blogs, and now begun the actual deployment of action steps.The beginning of March has marked the real start of a new endeavor along side my engineering day job... heading down the Wholesaling route, seeing as deals are the must-have corner stone for this entire business. 

It's being passed down from my friend's father to him, and with it a change of culture and a bit of innovation to their valuation tactics.As of right now they are doing most of their cash flow analysis by hand, and digging through online data sets to find out information like traffic flow and average lease prices in a given area.

Most Chinese people are into fengshui.