Had I hired a professional, it would have been done in a month and the extra five months of rent income would have paid for the contractor, saving me six months of nights and weekends.

Any 'non corp' person or entity that you paid more than $600 in a calendar year for your rental needs to be 1099d.     

When I looked into it, I saw that the STR she paid for was managed by Vacasa, yet the "owner" was answering requests from guests for bookings and taking money. 

You can probably live well off ten houses if they are paid off, but where are you getting the money to do that?

Using a Self-Directed IRA (SDIRA) allows pre-tax dollars to grow tax-deferred in real estate, but limits flexibility due to IRS rules and potential UBIT on leveraged properties.Investing through a Roth IRA offers tax-free growth and no RMDs, but funding limits and restrictions apply.

Pre-internet, being a landlord wasn't easy, but it was straightforward (this is a gross oversimplification).

These gurus leave out of a lot of information and were lucky to scale that quickly from pre-2012 to 2021, which is really hard to do now in 2024. 

I think a problem if we own it is how the builder would get the construction loan since it is my understanding that in these type of deals, the builder would leverage the paid off land for construction.We would want to be passive.

He paid for common area access, built a bed in his Land Cruiser, pocketed the rent but we had agreement on what the pocketed money could be spent on (seeing we were paying the rent). 

Just curious what is the long term plan as far as minimizing tax in later years as the account in pre-tax become huge?