I'm biased (as we all are ;-) but I did a post that shows one way to get to where you want to be:https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/600/topics/58...That will get you started.

I'm obviously biased, but I'd suggest the mortgage side will be more useful because you will be more exposed to the numerical challenges faced by real estate investors.

We are certainly biased though.  

Yes, but I am biased, since I very much enjoy real estate, not only will you learn a tremendous amount, you will often have access to the best deals, before they even hit the market, due to other agents in your office or people coming to you for advice.

I recommend you work it backwards.Lots of opinions but very few have done the work.If you know of a property with C/E violations, pull up the documents and reverse engineer what was recorded, what was filed, under what statute(s) and authority it was recorded, etc. as for my opinion about the biases of the personnel, I'm not risking sides.

For your own house, it's a different story.3) Keep in mind your agent is a little biased as a 500k purchase nets a much higher commission than a 200k purchase.

Principals operating a brokerage type model with very little skin in the gameIt doesn't matter a lot if you speak with someone who did diligence with little skin in the game or a bias toward doing any deal to keep their venture capitalist partners happy.  

@Robert Burns, I'm the first to admit that I am bias - I now work for an education and coaching in multifamily investing as you can see in my signature. 

Since you're asking about meetups I'll mention my own first (bias alert!).

I am a provider so my answer to that would question would be biased.