For me, real estate was a means to an end...so that I could spend all my professional time doing what I love: helping people and renovating properties.  

I'm happy to spend more time discussing GS & OBA properties in detail with you!

You can spend as little as $100 to form an LLC, or you could use an attorney and spend $1,000 or more.

Then don't rehab for zero COC return.But if you can spend $3000 on the lite rehab and increase rent from $1000 to $1050 then you'd gain $50 per month.50 x 12 = $600 more annually because you rehabbed.600 / 3000 = .2 or a 20% cash on cash return! 

They spend a ton of money on advertising their product and apparently have none left over to spend on product development.

Learn by doing, not by paying.You can do all the right things after spending $40,000 on mentoring and not end up with any real estate.If you invest in a project.....very low chances you end up with nothing.   

I can pretty much guarantee that you will loose WAY more money trying to get out of the lease then you will spending the extra hundred dollars or so to paint an additional room or two.

For the 4 plex you are spending an extra 80k in renovations (I question your 110k renovation number to get to 4 units - this could be low but I don't know the square footage or layout).

Prior to investing, you should be spending a lot of time with discovery.

Most agents, I can tell you from experience, will not spend too much time on you since your so fairly new and at your purchase price your not a big fish so they will tend to put you on the back burner since heir return is not going to be a game changer.