They don't care about your property, won't suggest the improvements, and just live of you.I self manage AirBnb in Seattle and hired a remote PM in another property and should admit that if the PM is not local I could do the work and take care of the property much better than a hired PM.

If you just hire the cheapest or first PMC you speak with and it turns into a bad experience, please don’t assume ALL PMC’s are bad and start trashing PMC’s in general.

No REP or STR needed.

Spend $15,000 per house to make them rental-ready and hire a property management company since you don’t want to manage them yourself.

I hired @Vic Valera as my Property manager starting in 2022.

Due to horrible, and I mean horrible property managers in the area (the one known as being the best admitted to me she recently had an employee steal over a million from landlords and she didn't think it was her fault), I decided to hire a family member full time to start managing properties for me. 

I think hiring a trusted contractor is my next step in getting actual numbers to see if the deal is worth pursuing or not.

I would call some local leasing brokers in your area before you have any non-refundable earnest money to get an idea of the tenant demand for something like this and if you are new to retail leasing/investments I would highly recommend you hire one of those brokers to negotiate the lease for you.

Getting permits takes months and finding/hiring reputable contractors takes more networking. 

What they mean by that is that they will  respond to a call about a leaky toilet, send the maintenance guy to confirm that its a leaky toilet and then hire a third party to come fix it.