Or maybe me sitting in a lawn chair while painters painted an empty unit tipped them off?

I hire a framer to frame, a plumber to plumb, a painter to paint, and a realtor to sell.

Brandon this is about a 7-8 mos. project for us - to flip the entire building over and renovate it and get it back online with new tenant pool of occupants - I renovate as many as I can simultaneously, just set it up like a conveyer belt and move through them in sequence:*Demo team - remove all old fixtures, flooring etc, cut out all tile in whole sheets - then they set the new cement board and get the drywall hung and taped, set the new plumbing rough-in valve*Flooring and Tile team follow - get that installed with the new shoe mold on the perimeter*Painting team follows*Finish team returns for all fixture and finish install - *Painters complete touch-ups if needed *Cleaning team - BOOM!

i.e. a painter spills a bucket of paint on your new wood floor that seeps in between?

If rehab and sale, and owned a short period of time, it's completely possible they had no idea there were issues, paid the painter to paint something, and after some time the issue came about.I had a house I bought in Nov. all winter it had no issues.

Are these general contractors or sub contractors like painters, flooring contractors, etc?

Our framing crew is all Caucasian which is fairly rare.Our siders are a branch of Mennonites as well as our painters but they hire Hispanic labor..

I have a few good contractors, plumber (just did my sewer line yesterday), painters, probably most of what you'd need.  

I am thinking I might get better prices if I hire the painter separate then the plumber as well as the job will get done quicker.

One of my coworkers is a painter on his spare time and people come to him consistently about custom pieces for which he gets paid a good bit of money.