That is part of your return and you have to account for it.Since the beginning of time middle people have basically exploited inefficiencies in the market but eventually get eliminated or their role is drastically reduced: travel agents, stock brokers, floor traders, money changers, banks with tellers, cashiers, book stores, etc...

My experience is: if you have a rental that you clearly are putting in the bare minimum to get it rented: cheap carpet, quick coat of paint, cheap light fixtures, repaint cabinets, etc, in these lower income, higher crime areas two things will happen.  

I have it on Cozy, Trulia, apartments.com, Realtor, Zillow, and a travelling nurses site.  

I was also thinking maybe find a home for cheap and restoring it for myself with a construction loan.

Obviously we are tempted to try the cheaper option, but we know there is a catch, it's that cheap for a reason.

Lots of cheap areas look really high COC but then you have an eviction or lots of turnover costs and the COC in real life gets way lower.

. - LLC doc sets are fairly cheap and easy to create these days (with limited assistance from lawyers) and its much much better to have that cover bases on arrangements like this - it will also fit nicely with financing options - whether you take on debt from a lender in a co-equity situation like your first plan (refinance loan to LLC post rehab?)

HomeGuard is not cheap so I want to make sure this is worth spending money on.

I had to give them the bad news, there were no beach properties that cheap and the real prices are $1M to $5M.These articles pull the sales data for zip codes which can span over 100 sq miles, but then show the income data from a small area (1 to 10 sq miles) within the zip code. 

Typically something like this we would coordinate a time when the tenant is out of town traveling etc.Also 3 days for a shower seems excessive.