Giving for a tax write off is giving to receive and that's not offering first fruits. 

many would ridicule them for this as people could not understand why they did not want to juice returns..I sold all my rentals a few years back but i do have new construction projects that will come out of the ground later this year.  

It may take some years but for real estate - the juice is usually worth the squeeze.

Having multiple properties with your name on it make you super easy low hanging fruit for lawyers.

You own the domain name, the URL and all your SEO juice is attached to that domain name.

Later on, as you have acquired more, I would lean back a bit and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

My advice is to always look at the fruit. 

As for real estate meetups, these are great networking tools and as such highly valuable, but typically seem to bear little fruit for capital raising.  

However about 15 months of that was spent trying to get it done on my own and that was not fruitful.

More often than not the lending process is somewhat like this:- Wait "24-48 hours" for your broker and/or lender to get you a quote that is most definitely juiced with teaser rates and unobtainable proceeds. - Wait 2-3 days for some junior analyst 2-3 days to pull comps (which the lender won't even use) which is simply unacceptable- Wait 1-2 more days to figure out that your lender requires X% equity to enter the X market.By that time, the amazing deal you found could already be lost.tldr; If you can screen your deals with intelligent market insights, real-time financing options, and support your expenses with up to date comps with ACTUAL financed comps you'll be lightyears ahead.