We do our best to track actual traffic from differenet websites and there's really a Big 5:ZillowTruliaHotpadsApartmentsZumperCraigslist does its best to avoid working with syndications and was surpassed by Zillow years ago - so, no longer worth the effort of manually adding.Facebook Marketplace doesn't like property managers and will ban you if you post too many properties.

That's how you avoid risk if you're buying distressed RE.

I’d suggest you try to keep your payments and number of roommates both lower to avoid losing everything. 

Conversely, you will run into people on your list that just seem to be a waste of time, so you’ll want to avoid them.

Finally, I would avoid Property Management Companies. 

As others have mentioned, avoid paying for work upfront; instead, make payments based on completed work.

I've decided to not attend college, so I can achieve financial independence faster and to avoid student debt.

You could be creating unnecessary paperwork, headache, admin responsibilities, etc.This is more of a legal question, but typically I would think for a holding company you would want to list yourself as the manager of the holding company.

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!

Every single part of this could have been avoided if you did even a little due diligence of your own.