I'm all about the education aspect, so I'm incredibly excited to start learning in depth on the subject.My wife's family lives in and around Pittsburgh, so I'll be networking and learning the local geography through them as much as possible, but I also plan to go to as many real estate meet ups (once I find them) as time allows when we move up there to network and hopefully meet some of the local players.

There is opportunity I think in a lot of places, but you really have to study and work hard....just like every other aspect of real estate. 

I've seen and heard multiple times to not study real estate as a broad subject, but to focus on one aspect and pursue it.

Study all aspects of investing.

There are a few programs now that automate certain aspects but it does not affect what I do.

I do think many of the property management companies around here lose sight of the customer service aspect of the business. 

Find your deals that will work with renovation costs ALL done by contractors, if you have a skill and can save some money here and there, then by all means put a bit of that to work but there are too many rehabs that fail because the buyer got too far over their heads with the project and many of these thought they could do every aspect of the rehab themselves... leave that to the professionals, just make sure the numbers support the amount these professionals cost :)

I find them to be on average significantly worse at every aspect of managing real estate in comparison to how I run my rentals.

It seems to me that the $12,000+ (and the time and energy) would be better applied to making an actual investment vs. paying for very broad over view of a few aspects of this.Just my opinion on this. 

I outsource almost every other aspect of the rental properties, but when it comes to placing tenants, inspecting units, and responding to tenants I really don't trust anyone else to handle that job.