I would honestly look to connect and start one-on-one conversations with people in your area by doing the two following things: 1) search for real estate agents in your area using BiggerPockets and 2) search through the forum for your city and check out people that have been posting in the forums about relevant topics.

Here's a link to an older thread (still relevant) about this topic that might help you in your due diligence if you decided to go that route: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/55/topics/361...Best of luck!

@Brian Burke  knows a lot about Lake co as well if you can get him to comment his thoughts would be relevant and probably more germane than mine at this time..

Yes, all degrees you listed are relevant.

Here is a link the relevant article. https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2015/01/0...The appraised value on this property should be in the 140k range and I'm under contract for less than that.

I'm sure your market is different than mine, but hopefully some of these lessons are relevant in your area too.

I'm still learning to navigate this site and how to find the relevant articles for me. 

This lease does not change the length of your lease term (month-to-month); it simply updates relevant matters now that I will be assisting you with your housing needs.

Well, in a way - I used a template letter, pulling relevant data from Excel via mail merge (owner name, mailing address, property address, offer amount).

@Leshon Hill  really looking forward to you posting the numbers, address and all the relevant details of these AMAZING deals you're doing.