IMO, the best start to financial independence in REI is to purchase a property where you can rehab it, rent it, refinance and pull your investment out and repeat until you have your $4-5k in cash flow.  

I'm shopping for another at the moment in order to repeat the process!  

There are probably some very good turnkey operators that consistently leave enough "meat on the bones" for the investor to make a return, but I think most milk each property for whatever they can get out of it, doing the minimium "lipstick on the pig" renovations, inflating the price to over market value, puffing up their pro forma financial projections, jacking up their property management fees/kickbacks, etc. without much regard to if their clients lose money, and there are plenty of uneducated buyers where they can do this and more of their high profits paying out of state marketing affiliates (many of whom are here on BP posing as investors and talking up how great out of state turnkey is) to locate new buyers since they get no repeat business after their buyers figure out they're losing money.

But, rather, a rant that's been repeated here before.

Then if he likes it, boom: you now have a real estate mentor and you just rinse and repeat moving forward.

For whatever reason we see people thinking that they need to start wholesaling so the can earn money to buy and hold. we see that mantra repeated ... over and over again.when in fact wholesaling is an advanced strategy and one that for all these folks reading this stuff 95% will FAIL  5% will go on to close deals and move up the chain and figure out after time to start a business put the cash together so they can actually buy stuff.. or get licensed so they don't get shut down and work in the grey areas of RE....

In  my markets it is generally +110% and then -9% and then repeats. 

Emmett Gorman:If you look at the Cronin article, posted about a year ago on BP, and look at his footnotes, you will see that his research involved reading content already posted on the internet, and repeating that in his article.  

I have knowledge of this section of REI, but I haven't gotten that 1st deal done YET, but I'm constantly studying and reading the ins and outs of wholesaling to make sure I won't fail by not knowing what is a deal and how to structure it to make it worth their time for potential buyers to be repeat customers.

I have knowledge of this section of REI, but I haven't gotten that 1st deal done YET, but I'm constantly studying and reading the ins and outs of wholesaling to make sure I won't fail by not knowing what is a deal and how to structure it to make it worth their time for potential buyers to be repeat customers.