Hello all!Greetings from Zach Chappell, a novice investor from Madison, WI. I am a UW-Madison graduate in my late twenties who has been cultivating an interest in real estate investing for a couple of years, but has y...

You are going to hire an experienced professional who is going to teach you a lot, so don't expect to bargain a lot of fees away from them.  

Nobody had books out there on QuickBooks to teach me, so I had to bite the bullet and study the manual.  

Well, I'm still going to suggest you read and understand your state's text book for study by real estate agents, I'm betting that none of those books teach "real estate" which is the foundation of what you expect to deal in. :)

Thanks for the advice :) While I do feel that having a mentor is great, I still feel that I meed to do some reading because most successful debelopers don't have time to teach the basics, and development is such a risky busimess that I really want to have a stron foundation of knowledge.

Many of them are cheapskates, one well know national investor teaches his investors to find bird dogs to find possible deals and comes up with $15 dollars for the lead.

Car and Driver is a magazine about cars, it doesn't teach how fix cars or how to drive them.

Higher risk markets will have higher cap rates: Investors want a better return for a higher risk.Low risk markets will have lower cap rates: Investors can settle for a lower cap rate if there is little chance they can lose.So when I hear “guru’s” teach that someone should only look for 10 cap properties that’s like telling a new investor that they should only look for $90,000 houses.

@Brandon Snyder I currently teach in Korea, and I am running the Seoul REI Meetup.I hope you enjoy the podcast as much as me.There is a lot of great stuff here and a lot of great people who are willing to help you.

@Carlos Burgo listen and study the BP podcasts, they are FREE and can probably teach you just as much as you would pay $25K to learn.