A lot of what people on here tell you to do is what also gives Landlords a bad rep and often causes cities to change laws that limit Landlord abilities.

I hired a VA who I thought knew AF, but he's made it worse.

Screening and hiring a property manager?

I plan to hire a general contractor but would like to understand the basic process.

After about 2 years of owning had to move out of state and hired someone to manage the properties.

Do I hire a property manager?

I've had some helpful reps and some reps that are level than polite.

We used to have in-house inspectors but it was hard to scale and with our heavies season being that of summer months, at 1000+ units we weren't able to hire enough inspectors for the last day of month move outs and first day of month move ins and then still keep them fully-employed in our slower season in fall/winter.

I called my client rep, but got an auto-reply that she won't be back until 7+ days without leaving any contact.

In most states, the company that owns the property can hire an employee to manage the property for them without a license.