You came along last year and bought the property for $300,000 as an investment property.So in year one, your taxes were based off the previous owner's purchase price of the $100,000 plus any annual tax increases since they owned it.  

Quote from @Erick Pena: A "good" rental property is one that covers all expenses (mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance, property management fees, and any other costs) and still leave a surplus (commonly referred to as cash flow).Calculate cash flow as: Cash Flow = Rental Income − Operating Expenses − DebtThere's much more to it, but that's the basic idea.

The Chicago Association of Realtors'® specifically state "When you become a Dual Agent, you owe equal fiduciary duties at that point to both parties in the transaction, and you lose the ability to negotiate for, strategize and advise either one."

If your state is an expensive one it might be cost prohibitive to have an LLC for a small rental business.

-Bill Mcbride newsletter if you want narrow and deep insights about weekly trends in housing -JBRE is a good one for deep dive on housing stats.

I am in one of the higher tax brackets and could be saving around 40k~ a year on taxes with this.

So as a newer person in an area if you want a lot of bids before you close you'll normally end up with the more expensive guys or the ones that don't have work at the moment (usually for a reason).

How does one do that?

Knowing that I'm not the only one is very reassuring.

Quote from @Robert Zajac: 15% markup on maintenance is one of the highest I've heard of.