Do you guys have any advice on how can I get started in my real estate journey as an agent and potentially an investor??

From Brooklyn to Florida and Mississippi, your expertise as an investor, agent, and designer is impressive.We’re excited to have you here and look forward to learning from your experiences as you work to change lives through real estate.

With enough knowledge you can make a educated decision on which approach you take.My experience:I personally don't sign up for any program who take you aside during events and try to sell packages that is just blatant sales strategy.Once you sign up there is every attempt to make you sign for their programs for bookkeeping, registered agent, LLC or corp setup fee which have ridiculous even with platinum membership.Basic standard structure they suggest to take advantage of multiple deductions can be easily achieved by proper education or work with a good firm like https://wcginc.com  who is local to you.A umbrella C-crop to manage all other LLC properties and take advantage of many tax deductions that are not available with a llc, its also used to take losses up to 100K as startup expenses and dissolve the entity after few years.Few LLC entities for investing in Real Estate, etc preferably in Wyoming or Nevada ( you can find many companies online who can do this for $150 compared to anderson $1500-$3000) , they will claim they have a secret Operating agreement which is bogus.They certainly try to take advantage of tax loopholes and claim to be smart people, my view they are just taking advantage of numbers as per their own statements.

I felt I had a good head start since I was already a real estate agent and was very comfortable with finding comps and figuring out the ARV.

@Greg ReeseMost small investors will benefit by having the LLC created in the state where the property is located at.Creating an LLC in a state like Nevada, Delaware, Wyoming may be better for the big players if items such as charging orders, business friendly case law, anonymity are important to you.However, be mindful that setting up LLC's in those states will add to your costs as you may have increased annual fees for annual LLC fees + registered agent fees.

I highly recommend you work with agents in the future.

talk to agents. 

@Timothy Frazier Yes, the only reason to use HML as a down payment is if the property is "mostly turnkey" AND you don't have the funds to renovate AND you have strong CMA comps from a real estate agent that supports that the fact that you are buying a property that is under valued AND your renovations would push that so that you could refinance.

Huge counterparty risk, I am just working through a scenario where a correspondent HML in the midwest got defrauded from bad diligence and their funding partner is having to clean things up.

Cash flow can be great if you manage it well and keep occupancy rates high, but factor in the added costs of management, cleaning, and potential vacancy dips.