You have a lot of empathy that many in this industry lack.

But you'd be surprised at some of these average smaller towns can do STRs very successfully. 

There is a joke in the industry that anyone who says "I've been doing it this way for (insert number of years here)!"

I hope this give you a better insight as to how the industry works. 

I'd like to pursue sales, and for a while I thought I'd be looking in the tech industry.

Professional videos are by orders of magnitude more expensive and it is very hard to make an average (not high end) home look great on video. 

I'm not in your market, but once I had specific properties identified I called around to get quotes for lawn, pest, and internet, and then got average monthly expenses for utilities and added a buffer to get my OpEx.

Will average all deposits over last 12 months to calculate monthly income, and then depending on the type of business, apply an expense ratio. 

I don't mind paying fee, if I am getting a better return after fee.If you look at the sum of all the fee of a life insurance and divide them by the total length of the life insurance, you will see that the average yearly fee is lower than most of mutual fund.And I agree with @Jeff Nash that Dave Ramsey is of great help for people who don't know how to manage their money and are getting in debt.

But if they are moving because of too many maintenance issues, that’s something you can (or at least could have) fixed.Think of it this way: Let’s say your average vacancy is two months between tenants (turnover and time to lease).