Since I live in beautiful Orange County, CA I would ideally like to invest here, but it is way to expensive and I can not come up with the funding.

1) Whom shall I deal first ?  

I know I am suppose to network, and e-mail them to refresh their memories of me, but I am just having a hard time trying to visualize a scenario on how I would use their services, as I have no experience of being a landlord yet.Thanks in advance- Alain

but once I started reading the free e-book, I began to sense that the "course" was gonna be nothing more than a video version of the book. 

The property will be their pied-e-terre in about four years, and will be rented out until then.

Ideally I would have this as "my" business so as to show my own income for financing purposes but without an income to show to get started, I'm wondering what the best way to structure finance is so I can begin showing the rental income as my income going forward.

The crazy accelerated losses on your Schedule E are great for taxes in the interim, but it confuses the hell out of lending institutions that follow a traditional model of just assuming you lost a lot of money on these deals.

Yeah, that’s ideal.

I think that if the income from the property is logged in your schedule E of your tax returns then you can get around having to provide the lease(s). 

Currently the P/E for the S&P500 is say 37.