They will move to a different home where the owner keeps up on maintenance, and you'll be stuck trying to rent a non-functional home or paying a lot of money at once to fix everything back up.Best practice is to maintain your property.

LLC is VERY IMPORTANT to organize in the correct states that don’t require formal records to maintain separation between LLC and personal.  

@Marisa VoelkelI think having properties in their own LLC is not necessary for the reasons that @Andrew Syrios and @Benjamin Aaker mentioned.It depends on your risk tolerance and ability to keep organized.

A great idea here would be to create the site yourself externally and simply use the Hospitable widgets integrated on your website to get all of our PMS functionality on the website that you own.

Recognize being the GC is work, requires strong organization skills (especially with tight timelines), decent communication skills, and design skills.I have acted as GC many times and have done well on these rehabs but I recently completed a large rehab (completed mid May).  

Once you have a shortlist, sign up for an account with each one and test them extensively to see how they function.

Alltec is cheaper options out there, works fine with basic functions but certainly has limitation compared to other fancier ones.

Good communication with guests and a well-organized system for handling issues are also crucial.

I've found that Rentometer either overestimates or underestimates the rent depending on the location and condition of the property (e.g a house with updated kitchen, bathrooms and flooring will have a higher rent than a house where everything is 15 to 20 years old but still functional). 

I like that the HELOC functioned more as a credit card, and I only had to pay for what I used, so I had 200K of equity on hand, but only had to pay the interest on 120K.