John Fedro is a genuine individual who has built great wealth atound the concept.  

At the time, my naive brain had no concept of buying real estate (not even for my own primary residence) but then came the "Obama Tax Credit".  

I look at the whole concept of wholesaling as a way to "dig up" rough gems to later be polished by rehabbers and sold to end users who want that sparkle! 

Like you, I don't really know how to implement the pay-the-mentor-out-of-profits scenario, but it seems like a concept that could work.  

I understand the concepts related to RE much better.

The concept of a Credit Union is the membership shares some common interest (aka a co-op). 

@Edison Reis@Thomas Franklin provided you an overview of the concept, but mortgages and mortgage insurance are executed a little differently in Canada and several of his points are not applicable north of the 49th.In Canada, you can insure pretty much any residential mortgage (and a few commercial mortgages), however, similar to in the U.S.A. example provided by Thomas, mortgages must be insured when they are greater than 80% LTV (high-ratio).    

It's not a straight forward concept but using the 1970's as an example, most of the "gains" (measured by an increase in purchasing power) in RE was not a result of home price going up but the value of the debt going down.  

This isn’t too big of deal as the losses will carry forward, but you should understand the concept so you don’t have blown expectations.

The concept of sunk costs being irrelevant to investment decisions (aside from tax implications) is one of the core concepts I most vividly remember from getting both a BBA and an MBA in Finance.