If this $30k was instead invested in a taxable brokerage account, you'd pay capital gains taxes on the $70k of growth and be left with a tax bill as high as $14k.

I may be wrong, but will error on the cautious side. 

Takes no time or effort.If you are already paying your property manager to pay your bills and do your accounting, why not just have them generate reports you need?

This does not involve the utility company meaning that you will still have to go into the property, read the meters, then individually bill each tenant for their usage and understand the bill is still in your name.

I'm from Illinois and am itching to do my 1st real estate investment but not sure how a newbie like myself can finance a property without using my own money especially when it comes to paying for inspections, appraisals, earnest money, monthly interest and monthly bills, etc 

My net number is rental income minus expenses(3 mortgages, paying power bill at all three houses, property tax, insurance, internet in two properties).

I'm especially interested in hearing about how you've made a PMS geared more toward STRs work with MTR billing and leasing.I do remote operations support for an MTR/LTR company in Denver and am assisting with our tech stack build out. 

Or we gradually perform high-quality updates for a live-in flip, then roll the equity into a new home.Regarding rental income, we aim to boost income, lower our effective tax rate by generating more low tax-drag income with rental income (since there’s not much we can do to lower out W2 tax bills) and have retirement cash flow.To compare the financial impact over 10-20 years, we want to analyze renting versus flipping.

Quote from @Bill B.: It would be the markets with the worst appreciation or even depreciating values.

I want them to see the total picture and then keep whittling down to where they get close to say a 5% error rate.