Therefore your focus should be spent understanding how to operate your business in a manner that avoids conflict and liability exposure because that's the best line of defense.

I was in defensive mode, not OFFENSIVE make-it-happen-BIG mode. :-)I'm still new, and trying to find partners to help me with up front capital so I can do this, so joined BP for support there.

As you may know being local, SB249 is the bill that came up as a defense against towns like North Conway trying to shut down STRs, but it ended up in zombie state due to the sheer nature of diametrically opposed views on the matter and Governor Sununu’s push to do better than what the bill ended up proposing.Some details here: https://legiscan.com/NH/bill/SB249/2022As with all areas in New England I encourage investors to start thinking of oversaturated STRs markets as expense offset versus cash flow properties.

When it is a new development, it isn't uncommon to see someone use the date the Certificate of Occupancy was issued - perhaps that marks the "ready", but it still might not be "available".So you can certainly have a property in service in a given year, but not actually have any rental income - but certainly your facts and circumstances are much better if you can actually get a tenant in there, that (should) shore up your defense on that question ever coming up unless you are playing weird games just to get a given in service date for tax purposes.

Plus “foreclosure defense” which was created out of necessity in the last crash is very useful defense in a judicial state to delay delay delay then get a low interest rate modification.

There have been several moments where someone in subto will mention that Subto was being bashed by someone that's not even in the community and therefore, that may be why there are times where several people post in biggerpockets about their opinionsYour post started out in a defensive shill like posture.

In any event, signing with another buyer's agent would be irrelevant; either the original showing agent was procuring cause or not, and signing with another agent will not be a defense to such a claim. 

A defense attorney will not be able to get this information for purposes of a lawsuit. 

I am currently working overseas in Bahrain as a civilian defense contractor and won't be back in the US until at least the end of the year, if not much later.

Your best offense is a good defense.