Let’s imagine this attempt to find a mentor were your first REI: You find a house you really want.

So we can imagine buying a home for $300k in our 20's, living until we're 80, and having our heirs inherit and sell the home for $600k. 

Imagine if an app existed in which you could select a metro U.S. city and it populated a bunch of metrics relevant to real estate investing markets (e.g. population growth, unemployment, crime, job diversity, median house price, average rent, vacancy rate, etc).

Milwaukee and Madison have some areas of overlap, but I imagine the student housing vertical is bigger in Madison, for instance. 

One thing I can tell you, when I bought that first property in late 2014, I never imagined it turning out as well as it did, or eventually using it to move in to multi family investing. 

Making sure expectations are aligned is a great way to start a business relationship.Also - you're in a huge market, I imagine you should have no problem finding "an investor friendly agent in the Houston area." here on BP;)

I imagine the materials will be over $20K. 

You can imagine (experts and newbies alike) what that does for my cash flow.My options seem to be, flip the properties back into my name and pay 4% transfer tax, find a mortgage, then either put it back in an LLC or I suppose just keep it in my name.

I was very picky about what I was willing to take on as you can imagine.

Seeing as you are from California I imagine you're looking for this info as you are priced out of your local rental market.