I suspect this lender was just one of the hundreds of crooks out there doing teh advance feescam.If your interested watch the American Greed episode on Remington financial they do a deep dive into these companies..

He said even driving to pick up the rent check doesn't count (the driving part doesn't count), but picking up the check does (how long does that take?

New 200 amp circuit panel, Culligan water softner, new washer/dryer, and a deep clean Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

I would pick a market area you like and start doing a bunch of deep dive deal analysis, but from a rental and not a life style standpoint.  

However, once we implemented technology a few years ago, even our local clients prefer to avoid driving and switched to doing business remotely.

Starting with something near your market that you know the area, can drive by the property and meet people in person will get you more comfortable with the risk of owning property. 

We would need to go into a very deep, very bad recession that is housing related for that to happen however so I would not hope for that. 

First house in 2021 - no internet to search at that time, remember going to realtor offices and seeing magazines and talking on phone with them about properties available and driving by them as there was no google street view.

Most of our receipts are digital (email) so we just put it in drive and attach it to Baselane transactions as we go (weekly).

If you don't do anything within the software, maybe only your bookkeeper needs the software and he/she can print out the reports for you.If you want access, then you and the bookkeeper would need the desktop version and possibly a shared folder like google drive to share the quickbooks file.Intuit used to sell the quickbooks desktop(one time purchase).