Most also fail to understand the exclusions within an insurance policy. 

The irony is most investors who form LLC's do not operate them correctly, fail to obtain appropriate types or amounts of insurance coverage, fail to understand their coverage exclusions, take short cuts and don't obtain permits, use unlicensed and uninsured vendors,  fail to execute contracts with same vendors, don't understand the mechanism of additional insured status, indemnification etc. and are actually more prone to claims and conflict with their LLC than the individual who does not own real estate in an LLC but understands these tools I mentioned.

Building reserves for emergencies and creating other contingency arrangements is also a good idea.When I retired I already knew that I had more than enough to retire because I had already been living more than 10 years exclusively on my rental cash flows and building reserves for retirement.

@Mark Pruitt We almost exclusively use River Ridge Escrow in Cedar Rapids, closer Melissa.

There seems to be three lines of thinking (they are not mutually exclusive) about how to make better than risk adjusted returns in real estate investing.1. buy and hold while price appreciation, FUTURE cash flow, and loan amortization increase the investors wealth2. market timing - load up during market recessions, liquidate during market booms3.

You can also list non exclusive with agents and then if you find a tenant yourself dont pay commision. 

DSCR loans are not mutually exclusive to the BRRRR strategy.

Can anyone verify the tax treatment as of today that a gain from owner occupant unit is applicable for Sec 121 exclusion, and a gain from rental unit is applicable for 1031 exchange?

Understandable during the days of yore when all the data was exclusively held on the MLS and you needed agents to get access to reliable information.

My wife and I have been doing an MTR-exclusive startegy for 3.5 years, and we still have a hard time figuring out how to predict vacancy, especially in a new market that we're considering.If we look at FF's (pretty crummy) data on their website we either see very few listings, so we think "no one is investing here; bad" or we see a lot of listings and think "too much competition; bad".