We're looking to start investing in Florida with a motivation of snow-birding at some point. 

totally agree, I sell more deals for Columbus to out of state than the locals because they don't have liquify. even literally real estate agents with all the data at their finger tips there isn't enough motivation to convince them 

I find data on free sites like Zillow extremely helpful for days on market for certain homes, and it allows you to sort by bedrooms to see how long a potential property may sit on the market at this moment (great for comping rent prices in the area as well)if I were to live in the property, I would take advantage of the FHA low down payment option to keep cash in my pocket for Reno costs  Hope this helps!

We use QB for bookkeeping and accounting, and Relay Financial as our bank so we can automatically sort out a % for taxes and we pay those monthly/quarterly depending on what the township requires.

Does anyone have a good resource for some sort of turnaround plan or success plan they have put together as essentially a business plan for a multifamily property?

If you do not take the gold for delivery and have some sort of representative interests in the gold- look up what happened to Iceland during the banking failures.

For starters motivated sellers do not typically bring this up.

When using hard money, your rate is usually higher and you also have to pay some sort of lender fees and points. 

What sort of insurance does the manager carry to make sure she can make you whole should things go wrong?

A well-crafted agreement would have anticipated this sort of situation and outlined a process.