If you ever look at your tax returns on those schedules they have an even smaller list of categories.When you have someone handling your books, you will be utilizing a bit more GL codes so you can have a better read on your financials on a month-to-month basis to see if you can make any changes.

Then the guest speaker started discussing some legal topics and I thought some of the advice was not great (since I handle real estate transactions on a small scale) so it turned me off a bit.

You don’t want tenant paying the HOA directly because you’d still get charged as the owner if they don’t pay or pay late, so best to handle the HOA payments, yourself.

Understanding how an SEO company handles backlinks is a pretty good indicator of how well they understand SEO in my opinion (there are some decent ones out there). 

If you're someone who only has a handful of properties and they are pretty centralized in your area it might be best to just handle them yourself and invest in a good PM software. 

Every time it was handled differently  LOLIt should still be up to 25% (it could be less if your marginal bracket was less, but its not in your OP).Incidentally, you can offset the depreciation recapture with capital losses.  

But given that the renovation was done such a long time ago, there are some wear and tear, like Window and HVAC, shower handle and stuff, so we have been updating those one thing at a time, and I'm hoping that this house can handle another 20 year so the $ we poured in for the new set of windows are worth it...Would appreciate any thoughts!

You also did not give them any firm instructions about how to handle this.

Like @Brian Burke said there are many different ways cash flow can be handled and waterfalls structured.To keep the same example but for a 9% cash on cash return:$100,000 starting capital account balance$8,000 preferred return accrual (return on capital)$1,000 excess cash (return of capital)($9,000) total distribution (preferred return distribution+excess cash)$99,000 ending capital account balance

Does anyone have recommendations for an STR on-call service (not full property management), which will handle basic guest communication during their stay and handle organizing repairs (i.e. calling a plumber, HVAC, etc. ... not actually doing repairs themselves)?