Which is why I am now considering investing out of state.If anyone has any advice, tips or anything they can share from their experience investing in these areas I'm all ears.  

You pulled a out of pieces together for me and explained that perfectly to someone with VERY little to NO Real estate knowledge!

I live in the area and was happy to get a piece of something in my area I could drive to.If your priority is cash flow then it's going to be very hard to find anything that compares to what you're getting in the syndication (around 8%).

I’m not saying that you can’t find great advice on YouTube, but usually the advice is broken down into bits of pieces so they can sell you something.

Another good trick is to send a piece of mail to the vacant house and above the name write "Return Service Requested".

Here's a link to a piece about Assembling You Team that Josh posted:http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2006/03/15/assembling-your-real-estate-investing-team/

Plumbing is definitely a piece of cake compared to some other stuff.

As I grow I will probably integrate desktop programs (like MS Office, or OpenOffice, or Applix), to use MySQL as a backend, but this is only to make it easier for employees, or helpers.For data entry, and retrieval, usually a web interface to the database works fine, and likewise a shell program, or curses-style interface.For printing flyers, and addressing direct mail pieces, I use PostScript, and shell scripts I write to create the output.I am in South Florida, and I can say that this state makes a lot of public record info available in electronic format at the state, county, and municipal level, usually free, and available on the net.My website is simple, but seems to be working.

I hold to the philosophy that a successful marketing campaign should use various methods or marketing pieces to numerous types of prospects for lead generation.

And even then, how could you be sure you were not buying in a bad neighborhood or a piece of c___ house?