you should read more into low income housing. if the place is already beat up, just clean it up. low income housing is constant management. fix it up. 

I am very data driven and I simply don't see Philly as an attractive destination unless you are -- local, hands on, DIY, don't have prop mgmt expenses, don't pay leasing commissions, get preferred rates from lenders, know a guy who does handyman work, etc. 

Just major stuff that would end up costing me more than the cleaned up land would be worth.

If you have a great bookkeeper, that will help keep costs down, but my guess is that he is spending some time cleaning up the financial statements.

I mean once you talk to them, it's pretty easy to spot if they know what they are talking about.I've work on STRs before and to be honest, it is not the most fun aspect of accounting because the volume of allocating income from all sources (airbnb, vrbo, stripe, direct booking, and so on) to a bunch of random expenses (cleaning, supplies, repairs, advertising, commissions, and all typical real estate expenses).I had to strictly rely on the client's input on what the expenses belong to which property or even units, if the paperwork doesn't say. 

DIY will be the "cheapest" - you can set up an account on the MA DOR website, register your LLC, you pay over the whopping $500 MA charges you to register an LLC, and voila, you are off to the races.

They take 40% as a management fee and charge $30/cleaning.

I live in Phx,az and recently friend of mine sold his bank (ex bank of america) literally as is and profiteed $300k  , he purchased it right out cash last year (I think) and it was in real bad shape in a shady part of town,  before him taking possession of the bank  homeless people where living inside it an using the bathroom anywhere in the building, he put maybe less than $5k in just cleaning it up and just a couple of days sold it.Basically the idea is to find super cheap homes in ****** conditions but the price is so cheap that you could still make profit by selling as is, investing as little as possible..

As far as I know neither of these are a necessarily deal breakers but just means we need to have really good logs to back this up in case of an audit.4) I have a management company handling the scheduling of guests, cleanings after guest leaves, and check-in/check-out duties.

I handle early terminations basically the same way.It also gives the tenant an incentive to leave the property clean and move in ready