A good example of this is when an agent is selling you on their brokerage brand and saying things like:1) Our brokerage has "X" agents and "X" employees all working for you!

Do you know the employee told me that she's the only one working... balabla.

Start to evaluate deals based on the income approach and you'll do much better long term investing. 

My parameters were that I did not want to add more than 2-3 employees, I did not want to give up control over the u;to are yes - no investment decision, and I didn’t want my position to become a full time job.  

There are HELOANS - at that juncture, your best bet is to evaluate what is called the blended rate and compare that to an entire new first lien (cash out).

Since this is a post about our loan shop, I'll highlight that we are a small loan shop (30 employees), family-owned just trying to get more clients by placing their loans well and treating customers well.

A good example of this is when an agent is selling you on their brokerage brand and saying things like:1) Our brokerage has "X" agents and "X" employees all working for you!

The PMS around here are pretty terrible, I've worked with a lot of the larger ones in Cleveland and I think they just take on more properties than they can effectively handle and don't hire enough additional employees to make it work. 

Any tips or tools for evaluating the local market would be greatly appreciated.

You don't typically don't want this, as this is the lowest evaluation.2.