If you're looking to cut costs on a PM I would recommend using one for placing the tenant and then not having them manage monthly, I'm pretty sure some offer this option.

My handyman fixed the sheetrock after remediation that was cut by the mold team.

Stop hanging out with your deadbeat buddies who spend all day drinking, talking sports, and otherwise wasting away.

If you have a handle on the value of the house, can make an offer that protects you and adhere to the contingency deadlines like inspection and financing,  a buyer's agent does nothing but waste your time and cost you thousands.  

Do not waste time.  

You think that you hired a specialist and are paying for the corresponding quality, while in reality you might have some under-trained, unmotivated and unsupervised anonymous data entry clerk doing the work, full of costly mistakes and cut corners.Often, low-cost CPAs get overwhelmed with the amount of work they take, resulting in rushed poor quality product and mediocre (or worse) service.

Here's why. 1) If you take 6K off the loan amount, it drops your payment $41.44 per month but, if you take the same 6K and buy down your rate by .375%, your payment drops $226.73 per month. 2) While experts are predicting the Feds will cut the Fed Fund Rate, that doesn’t have a direct correlation to mortgage rates.

FYI, over the years, we've also learned to save a lot of money wasted on excessive management labor costs (we call them "stupid trips") by planning the occasional weekend to drive down, inspect our units and address any labor-cost intensive items that we can do over a 3-day weekend. 

Is the Only Way to Negotiate a Lower Price with Builders is to have a pain in the butt inspector find a laundry list of problems and meaningless in the grand scheme defects to compel them to cut their numbers to move to acceptance and closing?

Dalton, thanks for the vote, as far as @Jerry W. question, the boards are not cement board, they are drywall boards with holes in it, ran into these a few times. the boards you talk about Jerry are what was used when they tried to make plastering earlier ( they were the first drywall ) these products were sold in strips, not sheets, but they still had to be plastered just like with wood lathe. the purpose of the board was to cut down on the time it took to install the wood lathe.