It was my father's investment it actually at one point had been our primary residence he was just putting it on the market because he didn't want to deal with the stress of renters or have to worry about carrying costs.

@Paul Azad, regarding your example, I would confirm if the projected 14% return is net of all fees and carry or gross.  

Renting at a $220/month loss (about $5K/year) could allow you to hold out for future appreciation, but you’ll carry ongoing losses.

Honestly, not what you want to hear, but take photos of the damage, send them an itemized invoice and tell them what they owe you.

Probably based on this "Within 21 days after move-out, the landlord must send the tenant an itemized statement explaining in detail any deductions from the security deposit (unless they total less than $125), and return the rest of the deposit."

For anyone who wondered here a year later, if you also use Innago, you can avoid manually entering expenses by scanning the receipts and the item description and total $ amount will load automatically, as long as everything on the receipt is expenses for the unit.

While I would love to keep it for just us, having rentals to cover the full cost of carrying the property has been great.

But, we still hire outside to make sure we don't miss anything.If we had not hired an inspector when we first started, we would have not caught countless items, and would have overpaid on every deal.If you're going to hire a property manager, and expect them to give you an objective analysis, good luck.

Repairing water damage and fixing broken items is the bear minimum for a landlord.

There may be some equity that I can tap into depending on the DSR however,  I'm looking to see what other funding options are available to cover construction carrying costs that do not require W2?