Let's say you spent a month on the initial preparation: cleaning, painting, shopping for furnishings, assembling IKEA furniture and so on.

Find a lawyer and issue a lease violation for other issues such as excessive noise and furniture removal.

But, even if someone was I would imagine the financing terms you can get a mid level furniture store would be much better then a hard money loan anyway. 

A lifelong friend and I are motivated to (virtually) meet and connect with those in REI working in the Pittsburgh area.I'm active duty military and living in California with two rental properties (one in Virginia Beach & one in Pittsburgh) and my close friend owns a single family in Baltimore.  

In fact i will speculate the opposite as i believe virtually any investor who has held investment RE since the great recession highly values appreciation.

See if any of them will allow you to use their address as a virtual location on the Internet.

Also, when it comes to negotiating the rent: - Should I ask for a phone call or virtual meeting to discuss the price?

Even if you have a good framework, it's much harder to manage virtually and stay on track.

Virtual staging would help, pictures of the parking lot would help as well.

Virtually anyone lending HM in 07 to 09 had a lot of bad debt.