Hey Sean, Ken McElroy's "The ABCs of Real Estate Investing" is a valuable tool for anyone interested in learning about the fundamentals of real estate investment.

If you use the agent finder tool you’ll get me, so save yourself the time there.As far as the municipality, most of my folks are keeping a close eye on Clay, Cicero and North Syracuse.

I am unaware of a service that searches internationally. 

Do a GOOGLE search, get the tax information, read through any relevant documents the seller has provided.  

On another note, a Trust is an estate planning tool, nothing more.

People are learning to reverse image search or Google the name of the property to avoid platform fees. 

What tools or platforms do you find most effective for tracking payments and amortization schedules?

There was one instance discussed in the forums with a syndicator called Norada (you can search the forums for that name) where they not only stopped paying dividends, but also converted everyone’s capital to an equity position - which is code for “We don’t plan to give your money back unless we can survive to eventually sell the building.”  

FYI: My search criteria for Costar is - Multifasmily in Northern California.

BP has various tools to help you analyze your deals (rentals, flips, wholesale, etc). : https://www.biggerpockets.com/investment-calculators7.