Former electrical (the best engineers) engineer here.Engineering teaches you to think logically and avoid emotional-based decisions.Most engineers though, are not decision-makers, so they suffer from analysis-paralysis. 

Several years later, my $150K trigger hit and I sat down and determined that it was still a money maker, and so I set a new price Trigger to $200K. 

I am currently looking out of state for low priced, cash-flow makers.

In fact, it was clear to policy-makers that there wasn't enough gold in the system. 

If you want to make real estate your living, the way to do it is to make it your job and generally speaking becoming a broker is the "college free" way of doing it.

It's my experience though, that there's more face time meetings, trainings in GA REIA, gareia.org, plus they have their Deal maker's email list for real time problem solving, sharing contractors and buying/selling deals.But I belong to all the REIAs because I find excellent value in all the orgs.

I also love working with my hands and hate sitting at a desk 9 hours a day so hopefully one day I can make real estate a full time job by working for myself.

My goal is to accelerate this work and make real estate investing my primary income.

If there was a cafe or mini restaurant that's a money maker because everyone wouldn't have to go into town to eat.

You can use a sub-2 arrangement or just rely on a contract and option to tie it up and get paid at settlement from a lien on the property.Relist after improvements with the same Realtor, that should make them happy to help you.J Scott probably has a great spread sheet to identify problems, functions and issues but as to a profit, it's get what you can depending on the market.There is no short cut to make RE a simple process to follow to success, each deal must stand on its own and they are all different.