Is there a real difference between a mastermind, a mentorship and a coaching program, or only a price difference?

There are real definitions, and the market uses them loosely, so you need to ask what's being delivered rather than trust the label.

Strictly, a course is recorded or scheduled instruction on a subject. You get material and you work through it. A coaching program means scheduled sessions with a coach who reviews your specific situation, usually one-on-one or in a small group, and the value depends on who the coach is and how often you actually get them. Mentorship strictly means an ongoing relationship with one experienced person who knows your deals, and in the market it gets used for anything from that to a group call every other week with a hired staff coach. A mastermind is a peer group. There's no teacher at the front of the room. You're paying for access to the other members and the organizer's job is curating who gets in.

So the $25,000 with no curriculum isn't necessarily a scam, it just isn't education. It's a network. Whether that's worth $25,000 to you depends entirely on whether the people in the room can send you deals or capital, and if you can't name three of them you can't price it.

The question I'd add is what you're actually short of. Somebody with a construction background usually isn't short of knowledge about buildings. You might be short of underwriting practice, or lender relationships, or the confidence to sign. Those three problems have completely different solutions, and only one of them is fixed by buying content. Write down the specific thing you couldn't do last time you looked at a deal, then ask each seller how their program fixes that. Most won't have an answer.

Ask who teaches. On two of the programs I looked at, the person in every ad had not run a single call in the current cohort. It's staff coaches on a script.

The YouTube point is half right and it trips people up. The information is free. Sequencing isn't, and neither is somebody telling you the deal you're excited about is bad before you spend $4,000 on inspection and legal. I've been through maybe 60 hours of free content and I couldn't tell you what to do first, which is its own kind of expensive.

Girder, on the $12,000 mentorship, ask how many students per coach and how long the calls are. Weekly coaching often turns out to be a group Zoom with 40 people where you get about 90 seconds if you type fast. Divide the price by the minutes you will actually get and the number gets ugly quickly. Also ask what happens to your access when the twelve months end, because some programs lock you out of the recordings you paid for.

One thing nobody mentioned on price: my state's licensing pre-license course was $400 and it's the only real estate education I've paid for with a state agency behind the curriculum. It's not investing training, but the contracts and agency sections were more useful than the two free investing webinars I sat through. Worth knowing that regulated education exists at the bottom of the price range, and requirements differ by state.