My gut feeling and research is telling me the sellers did a poor job on the breaker panel and wiring.

I see this making it hard to scale.question: how come your rate is so poor?  

After assessor comes out and consults with insurance company, they'll send demo guys out to come do demo work and remove wet drywall, insulation, etc. they'll usually put down dehumidifiers and let the place air out a bit to see what actually needs replacing and what was able to dry out.

Ultimately it was the customer service and poor quality of my post cards that caused me to leave.

This was a poorly timed purchase at full retail so it likely is worse than virtually every other San Diego RE investor’s monthly appreciation. 

 - poor cash flow.  

Nailed it, the great moderation was extremely poor Keynesian economic policy.

Another "perfect storm of uncontrollable events".With both failed deals they are pointing blame on poor performance from the companies they hired to manage the property and to do the renovations, which raises a few questions:1) how can/should LPs perform due diligence on these to be hired companies?

I have eagerly wanted to get into this space..I had a few calls with Sunrise that had some pretty poor answers / or lack of to my questions so was leaning toward Four Peaks since those conversations went better. 

To avoid going through the same poor experience, keep reading.Even if someone gives you a referral here, do NOT make the mistake of assuming that the PMC will meet your expectations, just because they met the expectations of the referral source.In our experience, the #1 mistake owners make when selecting a Property Management Company (PMC) is ASSUMING instead of CONFIRMING.It's often a case of not doing enough research, as they don't know what they don't know!