I want to get the thoughts of other investors on what I could or should be doing to progress and scale up.

To get scale and passive you likely need 80 to 100 unit building.

To me it would be hard to scale up your portfolio as quickly without using leverage.  

If I were interested in scaling to more than the 5 STRs I have I’d go for it.

I know it can burn when you have a totally baseless case filed against your llc, because you'll obviously have to shell out the $$ for your attorney to defend the llc, money that you'll never recoup, but its necessary and really shines light on the ability of your operation to scale itself.As to needing to be licensed - I know W-2 employees don't need a license for brokerage activities concerning properties owned by their employer.

You can scale $0 to over a million dollars in real estate in just three years.

You wont be able to scale to 10-15 properties by using all you cash flow to pay each one off....and you wont be able to live off of one paid off property.You are going to have to leverage and then once you scale to your desired level, then start paying them off

there is just a ton of debt you have to take on and as we age we get debt adverse.. now in new construction we take on debt of course but we retire it.and yes its a job.. but when its in the right market cycles boy is it a good one  Can make more on one new build in 9 months than a rental house in 20 years.. so its just scale. and what you want to do .. 

Some think it's less risky to have moor doors because you aren't hit as hard by vacancy, can take advantage of economies of scale, etc.

Or find other investments to build on a smaller scale for now.Some jobs are worth keeping in the short run for how much they can pay you now, you save every thing you can and invest it.