My day job is in IT (network engineering).I am quite new to the real estate scene, and found this website by chance.

The point us, no matter how dumb or ignorant Realtors are as a whole, we've been burned by wholesalers too many times and you need to figure out how to compensate an agent for their time, expenses and expertise.

I drove buy it a ton of times afterwards to pray that it didn't burn to the ground.   

I am just getting my career started in the Construction Management field and currently work as a Construction Project Engineer for a Real Estate Developer.

I would agree with @Edward Burns about those may not be the best source of leads, except Probate.

Makes sense if the deals are there but burning your cash may not be the best investment per se.

Despite the quick success I burned out as quickly as I started, trying to handle all the leads and spend quality time with my young family.

I am currently a mechanical engineering student and I am very interested in getting into real estate.

Your optimization with search engines will do that

., houses that have been foreclosed on by local tax authorities for lack of paying property taxes. granted, most of these houses are in such a state of disrepair that they probably should be burned down and started over, but buying this way teaches you how to become one hell of a great handyman. start getting your credit in order. you hear a lot about these " credit repair" companies all around. the truth is,  THEY CANNOT DO ANYTHING FOR YOU THAT YOU CANNOT DO FOR YOURSELF. go to annualcreditreport.com and get a free copy of your credit report from all 3 agencies. by law, you are entitled to a free report each year from each company. on annualcreditreport.com, you can dispute every negative thing you see. thats how these credit repair places do it. they go on here and dispute anything that looks negative. by law, the credit agency has to follow up on your dispute to any and all creditors that you dispute. these creditors have 30 days to respond back to the agency as to whether or not this report is accurate. if they fail to answer back in 30 days, then that part of the report is removed from your report, just as if it never existed. hence, your credit score goes up and you become more desirable to  lenders.