The other half of the accounting records is coming from online purchases, utility payments, etc etc where they are sending you an email. 

We want to travel and invest and are considering converting this short term rental to a long term rental to avoid sales tax, paying utilities and general management of the property. 

Most investor utilize short term hard money debt to scale their flipping operations where the lender will fund 80+% of the purchase price and the rehab budget which can allow investors to work on multiple projects at once.

Eliminate debt, establish a budget, and save.

I hired a GC to manage the build out, but there has been no consensus on who is responsible for the utility payments (Water and Energy). 

If your credit is decent then I would utilize your cash as leverage to leverage:1.

Trying to manage a $1M Airbnb rental while it sounds good you got $6500 in bookings you still have significant costs to operate it with maintenance repairs, utilities etc.

If you're planning on utilizing a self-showing model with cameras you'll need to make sure you disclose to prospective tenants viewing the property that there are cameras on premise.At scale, we've coordinated 160,000+ on-demand/self showings with smart lockboxes over the past 5 almost 6 years with very few issues.

This explains why your taxable income was zeroed out on Form 1040, even if the standard deduction wasn’t utilized.

Assuming you don’t meet the 500 hour test, you will likely need to document the time of others spent working on your property.In addition, you need to have guests at your property as well.Until you are 100% sure you can utilize the short term rental loophole, I’d wait to do the cost segregation study.