My area of concentration is the downtown area.

Concentrate on learning your market in order to understand where/what a deal looks like. 

From your description it sounds to me like a casual read, much like reading a book on Henry Ford or Eli Whitney or other successful people, probably not the text used as the curricula for a business class at the Chicago School of Business or Harvard..Moving to the level where our OP is striving to attain I'd say he needs to concentrate more to graduate level classes, analytical studies, modeling, market testing, analytical finance and economics.

Since I've expanded now and brought on a team to help me with it I have time now to concentrate on what I really want to do.

I may just decide to continue to be satisfied with my 15% capital gains tax, partially sheltered by depreciation on my long-term buy & hold rental portfolio, and use the stock market holdings in my inherited IRA as some diversification, since I'm almost entirely out of the market these last 10 years, and totally concentrated on real estate investing.

I enjoy the forums but I am looking for a more concentrated read and get me a bit deeper into this subject area.

This spells opportunity.If still none, you can move outward of your market radius in concentric circles.

Here's concentration of distressed properties with the darker the red the higher the concentration: What's great about this data is that you aren't relying upon a gut feeling or hearsay to determine what your next move should be.

Thus I'm concentrating on the vacant REO with the risks noted above in exchange for the cap I'm looking for.Would love to hear the numbers on some other commercial deals you guys have been able to close.

I understand that starting off with REO's wouldn't be a great way to start off but i thought maybe it would be as difficult.. quick question should I just concentrate on finding home owners that are in distressed situations?