Ethics and integrity stand by themselves and don't need a religious label. 

I have a strong belief that winners win.

I suggest using a lease that is as one-sided in favor of the landlord as the local landlord tenant laws will allow.Most agents aren't specifically trained in how to screen tenants, quite to the contrary of the beliefs held by many uninformed people who believe that agents know everything about real estate because they are agents.And I have posted about this previously on BP; a search of the BP forums would have found at least one of these other threads.https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/829...https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/156...https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/12/topics/177...https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/215...If you have to or choose to rely upon others to perform tenant selection for your rentals, then you should at least learn about how to do this, so that you can determine whether the person you hire has an understanding of what to do, and to be certain yourself that the person hired is actually following the best practices (and not just reciting them to you just to get hired).You should be able to give a profile for the sort of tenants you wish to have occupy your rental, so that you can create some specific qualifying criteria.

I'd first just rather gather an educated guess and a reasonable belief in the rights to a property before I pay for legal assistance. 

There isn't anything inherently wrong with either of these bases and what they believe in, its just belief.

(the goal is having this live within the next 30 days)I understand why the belief is that I hate education or bash successful people or whatever criticism gets thrown my way centered around being a critic of "gurus". 

It took the change in the market to reinforce my belief in buy and hold.

In other words, the observations you've made on a small scale may not hold true on a national level (they may, but that would just be coincidence).Do you have any data to support your belief in this trend?

I can't really comment on the religious aspect of your passage but I will try and present my arguments to counter.

The fact that you are still investing is a testament to your commitment and belief.