Help! Am I doing something wrong? Do I have what it takes?

[Shalom Shore]

I'm turning the community in the hopes that you can talk me off the ledge. Or at least provide some support or advice. 

I dreamed of investing in real estate for years. I networked my *** off and managed to buy four properties, all financed at around 75% LTV, so I have some margins.

I picked a good location - Baltimore, where I have supposedly enviable cash flow, $400-600 per property after PIMI, but before variable costs. 

That's the clincher. All the stuff that goes wrong. I tried bracing myself for this in advance - "always expect something to go wrong" I was told. I braced myself for the 50% rule - I was gonna have expenses every month on the houses. A repair here, a fix there, I thought. 

I wasn't prepared for massive expenses, on all the houses, for what feels like all the time. Bleeding thousands of dollars in one go on pest removal, tree removal, mold removal. Expenses that wipe out an entire year's rental profits in one afternoon. How do people do it? 

I can't catch a break. Not a week goes by without a tenant complaining about an issue. And these are good tenants, who pay on time and try to take care of things themselves with the professionals I send.

And the truth is, worse than the expense, is trying to get people to help me resolve things. For fear of sounding like a trite broken record, It's such a huge struggle to find reliable people. No one has anyone to recommend. I find people myself (after calling lots of numbers where no one answers), have good initial conversations, and then they don't show up. There goes another day. Time to make more phone calls tomorrow while the tenant tries to live in a basement that's flooded in sewage. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not afraid of hard work. When I discovered heaping piles of bat guano in an attic of one my houses, I rolled up my sleeves and cleaned it all out myself. I try to be a valuable contributor to my local community, referring others to key market resources and helpful individuals. 

I supplement the costs of all these repairs with my day-job salary, otherwise this would all be over a long time ago. But I'm plagued with frustration, feeling like I can't get it right even though I've tried so hard. Am I unlucky? Am I actually lazy or undisciplined? I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing, or if other people have word of encouragement for me.

Thank you all for being such a great community.