The average McDonald's employee could afford to live in 218 now they cant.

If they were an employee of yours or a member of your team in a different business, would you dock their payroll if they made any mistake for you in their day-to-day job?  

This includes trips to properties for evaluations, trips to Home Depot, etc. 

i have up to 50k dry powder that i'm currently evaluating various ST instruments to invest in. 

I never go off of a flat percentage on anything, I analyze the costs to get to a specific return I target and analyze the risk that is involved. 70% may be an initial metric to see if it is even worth pursuing, but every deal should be evaluated independently based on costs, time and risk involved.

You can evaluate the additional cost and payback time as if you were paying for heat to get a handle on it but the jump to most efficient is probably not worth it in your situation.

Just like when evaluating a potential purchase you should be performing the same due diligence with rents.

Other than just going in and looking at what's on Redfin.com and using the tools on here to evaluate a deal, is there anything else I can do on here?

It's definitely important to evaluate appreciation vs cashflow.Do you mind sharing where your Arkansas deal was and how you found them?

Part of the deal, just annoying when payments don’t go through when they should and these companies are difficult to deal with (as nice as their Filipino call center employees are, I’m spending too much time on the phone with them).