Hi Daniel, you can still expense the following items out in 2023: travel, meals (50%), gardening, and tax consultation.

I don't think it's a bad business model, a turnkey company marketing to OOS investors, but since I didn't do business with them, I don't know much about their homes. 

There may be PM models out there that are hospitality based that can drive up revenue, and possibly not be 25%+ for you.

Then you and sis start looking at the market to find properties that fit your joint goal, and dad looks at his portfolio to find the places he wants to sell to get the funds to arrive at the model. 

Anything that is already there you can highlight in your listing, but people who need these items generally don't move around a lot after paying to put them in wherever they are living. 

If there are items you need to replace and they are less than $2,500, you can take advantage of the de minimis safe harbor election, which allows you to deduct those costs in the current year rather than capitalizing them.

They will provide you with a list of items, do them.

With the lower LTVs offered by senior lenders these days, it may be tempting to look at preferred equity and it may make sense since technically it is cheaper than LP equity, but also keep in mind they have a higher liquidation preference (obviously) but will often want all the cashflow (or a majority of it) to come to them before the LP investors and will also want large reserves, so make sure you model out the cashflows and understand the end-to-end deal with the preferred equity investors.We have some institutional investors with whom we did a combination of a pref and JV deal and it worked quite well for everyone including them and the LP investors.

Aside from the items that you already suggested, the only other thing you can use to verify the stated income is the seller's bank statements (not all sellers will release their bank statements, but some will).The expenses will vary a bit from owner to owner, so you're better off reaching out to a local property management company to get an understanding of how much things cost, unless you plan to self-manage the property. 

As we say in the sciences, all models are wrong, some are useful.