Be careful of the snakes in the grass.

For example... snaking the drains at a cost of $170 during the turn... no reason, just because. 

Go over and see if you can put liquid plumber or something in it to clear it....take a snake and plunger just in case.

I train my team to not waste their time snaking if they can’t fix it in 10 minutes and just replace it since toilet is under $300 (I use $120 Costco ones) but yeah these things are difficult to know for regular hosts.Besides that, it is unfortunate but I kinda see why Airbnb made that decision.

We use those out here, but with birdshot to take care of the snakes.

I'd love to buy up some land in the Christmas or Santiago Mountains, but I love hunting for and photographing rare snakes so that's sort of a niche use haha.The Chihuahuan desert and western mountains of Texas are no joke, it is some of the most remote, unpopulated, water-starved, but breathtakingly beautiful country in the entire US.Just FYI it's not that west Texans dislike solar or wind farms... we love money!

Sub $50k houses work well as the snake oil not only for the "distortion by contrast" effect you outlined but also from a basic practical sense in that it's hard to find a lender on that asset class (which would require inspection/appraisal/professional eyeballs on the deal). $50k is also conveniently too big for small claims court but not big enough to interest many lawyers.  

We had to get an industrial length snake to get at the problem as the sewer line was about 150’ long.

I keep thinking about tools that can help me reduce risk by catching errors or red flags in seller disclosures and inspection docs, but that's likely because I've had a bad experiences with both.A simple and obvious example is a seller checking "No" for pests section, such as Scorpions and Snakes in Arizona when the property is in the desert, so obviously, there will be snakes and scorpions. 

Now that I've seen this cockamamie theory pop up on multiple threads and videos from obvious snake oil salesmen pumping it on YouTube I feel like I have to keep dispelling the rumor.On David's first reply on this thread he said that using a HELOC to throw down chunks at a mortgage is better than making cash payments directly to the mortgage.