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.

Numerous bugs had laid eggs in the appliance (flies and fruit flies) and the old chicken stunk badly. 

Yes, over 2yrs, because these fruit-cakes keep coming on here saying the market is just about to crash from any little anything they feel month to month.

I didn’t know they had fruit in Kansas.

@Tom Ott  I have been to their offices.. what they pitch is they will find some bank REO which I could never get a straight answer about.. then they have their preferred contractors.. so they are making a commission selling you the home.. ( which is transparent) although I could not figure out if they were double escrowing or making a little more juice on the sale then purported.. as I never pulled the trigger.then they have a preferred lender they want you to use.. which is a pleasant fellow ( never did a deal so don't know the back end). 

But ask, what's tied at the hip to those in CRE of "power" but, without that "juice" to get bailed out?

When you are forming all sorts of small partnerships with no real "corporate" backing and pooled asset base to provide security for the counterparty, typically you can't get a swap.right so one of this big group that brought swap is making huge win when rate is going up, i would not reveal their name, you are right it's not for everyone juice. but for us small LP, investing to those big group and the small newbie sndication, is just about the same.for swap, i read in pensford website and they are really sophisticated, leant tons about interest rate.