Austin currently houses offices for Apple, Paypal, Electronic Arts, Google, Intel, Dell Computer, IBM, National Instruments, Xerox, Silicon Labs, Applied Materials, Rackspace, Yodle, HomeAway and many smaller start-ups.  

I really like Joe McCall's Podcast as well, he is that master of automation if you are trying to grow a marketing business related to real estate.Networking is key.  

I have many mentors who I meet with regularly who have been instrumental in my career.

There is a good discussion about long distance flipping and building a team in BP Podcast 063: Automating Your Investing, Long Distance Rehabs and Spec Building with J Scott.

Our emailed questions are placed into an automated ticket queue and never resolved or mentioned again.

I am a huge proponent of investing time in front-end setup in order to automate and simplify daily operations.Several institutions like Capital One 360 and one of my local CUs actually allow you to build checking/savings accounts on the fly, which is the way I'm leaning...Any advice?

I look at it like a safety net incase one of my deals blew up on me. in these great years of late were I have paid very large amounts income tax if I had a melt down project and lost say 500 to 1 mil  ( which has happened to me in 09) I could then go backwards and recapture all the tax I paid the last 5 years.Now of course that's me were I have high exposure to risk.. if your exposure to down side is not as great then I think anything you can do to get out of AMT is good.Although I also like the uneven distributions you can do in an LLC and the general flexibility of the instrument itself

Everything in my portfolio is now fully amortized and automated.

So aside from investing, I have the ability to rehab others investor's projects, automate processes and build websites. 

Depending on the property, the automated underwriting system might even waive appraisal.Upen Patel, Mortgage BankerFederal NMLS# 1374243