He apparently had a mobile lab and the cops pulled him over found stuff on the other guy and NEVER searched the van and found the lab.

Here's mine...Start -> Build mailing list of potential leads  -> while waiting for phone to ring, build buyers list -> While waiting for phone to ring with a trully motivated seller, continue building mailing list and keep sending weekly for at least 5 weeks -> Go to a local REIA meeting and network -> Go look @ all potential houses, going through the motions is good practice and makes you kinda feel like your in the game ->Have contracts, for when the big day finally arrives ->Continue to read and educate yourself, while waited for phone to ring ->Learn your market, hook up with a realtor that will give you comps on potential deals (more than one is better, don't want to burn anybody out so early in the game) ->Finally time to negotiate your first deal - good thing you did all that work before, you actually should feel like you kinda know what your doing. 

I know this is a lot of hypotheticals and many people would call me over-cautious, but it seems like many people underestimate the risks of leverage and get burned in RE when the market turns and they're in too deep.  

So that's somewhat of a buffer zone, I guess.I had a friend who runs a very successful business (very business saavy, but not really into real estate) preach to me that if you overleverage and don't own things outright, you'll eventually get burned.

And for a while this worked like magic, real estate was basically a preputium mobile throwing of money like an ATM and people quit their job and traveled the world.

One idea, if you don't have to be on the beach, look into park model mobile homes you can buy in an rv resort.

So your a foreigner and you dropped out of college to pursue real estate and you got 100 grand burning a hole in your pocket ... um you better start making better choices if you want to make it big in real estate .

I'm concerned that they may want more than 20% equity, or that they may not assess the value of the properties as high as I would need, or burn me on the interest and leave me scrambling for cash or a buyer.  

No one had died, the house was not burning down, and it was not an emergency of any kind. 

It lets you walk through a property on a mobile device, select areas that need work, and then input the cost and send out the contracts to your contractors.