What to do about the carpet--would a regular carpet cleaner be able to clean them and extract the water at the same time, or does this require a restoration company?

I think I need to object to the idea on philosophical grounds.When you extract a late fee it's because the tenant has caused you legal injury because if their failure to pay on time.

It's in their blood to try and extract as much money out of you as possible.

We just want to extract the money from the home to pay down some debts and make life a little easier for the next year.Banks are not an option.

Odds are he doesn't have the answers you are trying to extract from him and he feels annoyed with your constant nagging for clarity.   

Her daughter will be helping her apply for some sort of property tax relief which, they indicated, NY offers to the aged – not that this will help if she can’t pay it anyway.Also, the sense I got was that she hasn’t talked to the bank at all, though I assume they’ve tried to call her.Any other thoughts on what she could do to stay in the house and extract some equity to live on?

Let me explain myself so that others reading the thread can extract additional value. 

Mediation might be helpful if it is a slow leasing time of the year and you want to extract more money from the tenant and eventually evict them in 3 months or so when you can land a better tenant.Many factors play into this.

It is our experience that most turnkey providers extract all of the profit from a deal for themselves and then leave the investor with a high-priced asset that is almost always impossible to sell at or above the original purchase price.  

I'll be honest, I've only started looking into real estate investing in the last month, and most of my early strategies in terms of city selection etc have been extracted directly from books.