I mean, they did make a few courtesy calls for me, but that's not their role.

If things get testy, I consider myself  to be in the manager (or parent) role: "them's the rules, you agreed to follow them, here's what happens next." 

I've heard about Goldman Sachs and other large institutions buying thousands of loans and holding on to them (punishment for the its role in packaging and selling toxic mortgage-backed securities in the housing meltdown).

The reason I’m saying this is that maybe 5 years ago I went through a weird exercise of “How much cheaper would it be to live in...” with a couple of cities.

If you could get a 75/25 mortgage (just for a theoretical exercise) you have $30K debt per property.

You should live by the letter of your lease and local landlord laws, but there is some room to remember that your tenants are your customers. how much of that room you wish to exercise is your decision though.

Talk about the different roles ("hats") you both will be wearing.

There's an option to buy, so on the owners death, he can then exercise his option to buy, the heirs at that point can sell it to him capital tax free.4.

You should go through the exercise of building your own and understanding every number and how the formulas work. 

If you want to be analyzing that many deals (even when narrowed down to 10 MSAs you'll be looking at a lot of deals), I would stress that broker relationships will play a major role in your success level, in terms of finding good deals.