I've leased out SFR but not commercial and plan to hire a broker to assist as well. 

W-2, 1099, etc.) with passive income/loss from rentals is to meet the IRS requirements for Real Estate Professional Status or REPS (this also requires material participation in addition to specific requirements to be considered a REPS).Once you have clarity on whether or not you can offset non-passive income with rental losses you can then explore cost seg to accelerate depreciation (and some of the accelerated depreciation from cost seg will impact year 1)...

How have you found quality contractors that you continue to hire?

However, hiring a CPA will not save you any money, in other words will not reduce your taxes. 

The new guys we hired were not up to par so we thought it couldn't hurt to try this. 

I am usually giving (sometimes a little too) straightforward advice so they don't lose money or hire a guru.

They are a service provider - you can hire them to support a specific transaction, or not. 

There has been a lot of turnover in the featured agent program and I agree, the lack of responsiveness to us (the paying customers) and inability to reach an account rep directly, could use some serious improvement. 

This question has come up a few times with prospective clients recently, so I thought I'd shed some light on it.Generally, being an employee in a real estate business does not automatically qualify you for REPS unless you own at least 5% of the employer.

Only “off” thing that happened was an email to our insurance rep asking to be placed as the first and only mortgagee - which I caught and they quickly apologized for and corrected.