He's a busy contractor who sub contracts for my main contractor and I know they have a lot of work (I'm mentioning this because I think it speaks to him not skipping town).

I feel like that's what some people skip over when the talk about buying properties with no money out of pocket, I think you still need to have cash on hand to cover the unexpected.

@Joshua Schmidt would you recommend reading the original book on tax strategies or skip to the advanced version?

But the mice really soured them on the house and me, so now they are skipping out.

It's very easy.If the mailing address doesn't work, you can use a skip trace service to track down additional contact information.

I just want to meet people.It was only one meeting so maybe others are different, but I certainly wasn't sold on it.I would prefer to get a less formal group together and skip right to the haves and needs and networking.Is it worth the investment?

You should probably just save yourself the heartache and loss and skip an out of state investment.

He had a CDL so it was easy for collections to skip trace him.We eventually made our money back reselling the property & holding another note, but it took some time to recover.5 years later he sends me an email asking if we had any properties available 'rent to own'.

Skip tracing if they/he leaves and owes you money. 

However, his strategy assumes the investor is starting with little or nothing.Since I already have 200k in cash, I'm wondering if I should skip the multi-family properties and invest directly in an apartment building.My ultimate goal is to achieve 1M of passive income annually within the next three years.