After reading everyone's responses, it is very clear that a mentor is someone who has a genuine interest in seeing you do well in your chosen endeavors --- at no cost!

Be honest and genuine.

Have you had genuine interest from any banks?

I’m genuinely excited to get to know you all and hopefully we can generate some stimulating dialogue.

This could be a genuine reason, such as they need the equity for a larger deal, or they are relocating, or downsizing.  

Special thanks to @J Scott  @Mark Ferguson whose posts I read and were pivotal in convincing me that in order to be a genuine real estate investor, you need a license.  

Nobody talks or thinks like that so it's not genuine.

and passed them out to random houses on my route, doubled my income in the first year-various high school jobs, racing cars, chasing girls -Air Force basic training - where the lesson behind folding and refolding socks and making your bed 100 times in a morning is NOT about how to do laundry, it's about attention to details - never forgotten-first assignment in Germany where a higher ranking NCO taught me by being genuine that you should never be too good to do the job that you ask people under you to do-started my first business at 23, grew it from $ 60,000/sales year 1 to almost $ 1,000,000 in year 5.  

I was genuinely interested in what other people had to say.

What I would do is just start a genuine conversation with him, say that you're interested in real estate investing, ask him a couple of questions, maybe ask how long he has been in the game?