I am more of an advocate to just focus on making more money, improving yourself, and eventually you will have money to invest in RE. ( I am bias as this is what I did ) On the flip side, my partners never invested in anything besides RE and just stacked cash, flipped a lot of homes, and eventually bought rentals.

Birmingham is an amazing REI market, I am a bit biased, but it is the BEST!

Also, he has a ton of private lenders as clients.I am obviously biased because I grew up with this, but I'm sure you will get a lot of great comments.

There's a massive survivorship bias in real estate, where the folks you hear from are, naturally, the ones who stuck it out. 

YES, we may be a little biased, but check out our blog here on BP comparing Detroit to other cities and Deep Dives on Metro Detroit cities & neighborhoods: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...Your biggest question shouldn't be WHERE to invest, but HOW you will invest!

RV & Mobile Home Parks are my niche so I'm biased in this area.

It's difficult to have a discussion with him and learn so I'm primarily looking for someone or some firm that is strongly biased towards real estate that I could bounce questions off of for proactive tax planning.

Most answers to questions like this in other threads will come from TK providers and others who sell or refer to TK providers, thus they are bias opinions so keep that in mind.You may get better answers to your questions by searching for other threads like this and reading up on responses taking close notice to who is posting the answer and what possible benefit they may be hoping to obtain by making their post.

is always on my mind.With that focus/bias, the only type of partnership I'll endorse is being each other's capital partner.

There will always be biases that can kick in.