@Guang Yang online travel agency. i.e VRBO

He can spend the next few years-ish getting a finance degree through an online school while working part time, but he just got offered a full time position helping with sales for a local wholesale real estate company. 

In my opinion, an in person meetup > an online connection.You may want to consider making a connection here and meeting up for coffee or attending a real estate networking event.Best of luck!

This owner found a free lease template online that provided very little landlord protections. 

When researching online, it looks there are some instances where non-vets can assume VA loans, but the veteran's entitlement would remain tied to the loan.How common is this and are there ever situations when this a win-win for both sides?

GP's going dark on the LP's, no response to communications etc.

Here's a list of things to track:- Formal lease application- Formal signed and executed lease specific to your state- Payment history (I recommend using online rent collection like Apartments.com, RentRedi, etc)- Maintenance requests and receipts- Accounting for all rental-related expenses (repairs, utilities, etc) The more you treat it like a business, the more helpful you are to your CPA come tax time. 

We communicate with the tenants or have the property mgmt company communicate with the tenants throughout.

There are several other issues (undisclosed maintenance markup fees, excessive charges to our account, significant reductions to agreed rent without communication, etc).

About 3 months have gone by and we just received an email from a communications company billing us $4,000 for breaking a communication line buried in the yard.