@Mark S. mutual fund fees are much higher, they also tend to have turnover with many of the stocks they pick meaning they are trying to make short term plays this can increase the tax burden unnecessarily. 

It unnecessarily complicates things.Coastal Carolina areas can be great areas for a STR as is the Pigeon Forge area.Might be best to run your first one closer to where you are located. 

The longer you are invested the Lower the IRR. 10 years is a really long time for this type of investment.If you look at alternative investments I think you can find plenty (like stock market) that would beat this and you have liquidity.For example, warren buffet (or most likely his employees), ingested 250M dollars a few weeks ago in SNowflakes IPO.

The pest control will not matter if the tenant is not clean.The animals will eat the food,grease,trash instead of the poison.If there is nothing to eat they will ingest the poison and start to stay away.If you have a connected unit you do not own the problem could reside with those people and not your tenant.

Recently I've decided to take a step back and take off my designer hat and look at it from the perspective of a new real estate investor who wants to keep costs and expenses low and not buy tools unnecessarily or pay too many monthly fees for cloud-based services.

At that time I was doing very well (financially) but I still didn't want to unnecessarily throw money away.

That is an additional hoop the Lender is creating, unnecessarily.

It is NEVER a good ideal to spend money unnecessarily to generate tax savings. 

They will send the handyman 10 times a year unnecessarily and deduct it from the rent without informing you as you signed a waiver in your contract stating they only needed to seek approval for repairs over $500.I now require ALL work orders to be emailed me for approval.

And like you, I'm very specific when it comes to ingesting material, I always want to read every bit of the details, even for all the small things.You said: "I just use one separate account for all security deposits".See, to me, that's a bit vague and generalizing.