I own a property management company in Memphis and we are successful through communicating to our tenants and investors, addressing maintenance issues immediately, treating our tenants with respect (tenants may be rude to us, but that does not give us the right to be rude back), providing excellent customer service, hiring good people and paying them well so that I can retain quality talent, creating a positive work place where people want to come to work, having great marketing, adapting to the market changes, organized well and keeping investor cost low through managing our vendors closely and leveraging the amount of business we give them into significant discounts off retail.The only investors that I know that ended up in bankruptcy court were the $0 down investors who did not know what they were doing and figured real estate was buy a house, rent it out and cash the checks.  

I have also utilized Meridian Title Company in the past and they are an excellent resource (it's inexpensive to use a title company, but some states require an attorney to finalize the transaction and record the deed).  

@Matthew Thorp  The message above from  @Chris M.makes an excellent point. .

Gents, thanks for the excellent information.

Excellent job

Elizabeth,You have an excellent website.

Excellent!

@Jeff Rabinowitz made excellent points.

Our investing strategy will focus on single family homes in excellent school districts (thus far, we have 2 SFH in Keller ISD, and 1 in Northwest ISD- Byron Nelson HS), as well as multi family properties that make sense from a cash flow perspective (We've looked at 2 four plexes, and we're currently evaluating an 8 unit apartment complex).Here are some questions we have for the well informed masses at Bigger Pockets:#1 Do [you] recommend that we set up an LLC for all properties, or a series LLC, delineating each property into separate LLC's "underneath" the main LLC?

This website can be be an excellent source of information.