I've been an appraiser and a broker for many years...now I'm trying to find my way in the short & long term property investment game.I have flipped a few houses with my dad over the past couple years, as the broker and guy on the ground (he lives in Cali) but now I am venturing off on my own.I have a very firm grasp on how to locate, determine market value of distressed properties, and after rehab market value via my appraisal experience but am still learning the ins-and-outs of investing.I look forward to getting more involved in this site and learning from people who have been through it all.I am currently under contract with a house in the burbs and looking for a good CPA familiar with r.e. investing to get my finances in order, if you know one in the S or SW burbs of Chicago, please let me know!

Don't try to make it harder than it is, RE is pretty easy if you have a grasp of your local market, understand the basics and you understand the financing. :)   

I'm gonna reread through this tomorrow and get a better grasp of it and might have some more questions.  

None of this is to say that you can't innovate, but I'm not sure I'm hearing a grasp of what you're up against........... 

I also meant that he probably has experience in financial matters, investing and understandings if he's playing in the stock market, not that he is a degreed accountant, but has a grasp of money management and risk.

After chatting with my lender here, I have a slightly better grasp on subject to.  

Sure, there's a lot of similarities between proposing a sandwich shop business or proposing a real estate company, but the way to grow and expand a sandwich shop is relatively easy to grasp onto, whereas real estate for many people is more difficult to comprehend - partly because there isn't a "trending sandwich market" in the same sense that there is a "housing market" and also partly because despite the fact that many other businesses equally rely on loans and leverage, real estate quite honestly is probably a more debt heavy business than other small business ideas and a lot of people still have a lot of fear regarding these collateralized house of cards that fell apart during 2007-2008 housing crisis.Now, that's the reason I think many of the people I talk to have so many apprehensions, so I basically take those apprehensions and in a more concise manner than what I just did, basically explain to them that housing is a service, just like any other service and it's something that people are willing to/have to pay for.  

A realtor would have a better grasp on this stuff.

It's not a motivational book, but rather one that's designed to teach you how to interpret pro formas and how to do and understand key calculations that are essential for success in real estate investing.And for fun I teach once each year at Columbia in their Master of Science in Real Estate Development program.I've been in the real estate software business long enough to have learned that there's no point in trying to sell people analysis software if they don't have a good grasp of the financial concepts that underly real estate investments.

He advised me to get the ball rolling which meant to start reading everything within grasp and go take the NC Real Estate Provisional Broker's class.