The reason I was NOT using a CRM was time wasting data entry, so I ended up with Hubspot because the free version will spy on your outgoing emails (if you OK it) and auto-add people to the database.

Get an experienced person to go through the house and once you know what it'll cost to straighten it out, go from there.

In those situations, I've advised the outgoing tenant to make sure they turn off their utility accounts as of X date and advise the incoming tenant they'll need to get their utilities turned on before their move-in date or they might end up having a few days without them.As a general rule, I only have utilities in my name while the house is vacant. 

You can keep the reserves all in same place if you don't want to complicate yourself with different bank accounts - just use software to track the expenses and reserves per each property so that you know at any time with ease how much you have incoming and outgoing and reserves for each one.Once you have several properties, you can relax a bit the reserve contributions.

If the property is in a good location, and by renting the property you can make it positive cashflow (ie, rent minus all outgoings including mortgage still leaves you with profit left over, then it would certainly be worth looking at keeping and refinancing out as much equity as you can (but stay positively geared). 

@John TeachoutI just ment for the less outgoing of us who find it a little harder to connect.

From what I’ve observed so far, it seems that most REIs are very social, outgoing people.

With the lease option, I worry that while I'm happy with the price today, I could see a drop in value of the property over the next couple years and have trouble obtaining a conventional loan without injecting more capital into the property.All thoughts or opinions are greatly appreciated.Edit to add:My question is geared toward loans that are obtainable by people with 700+ credit scores and strong income in relation to outgoing 

If I were the old landlord, I would allow my outgoing tenant to pay me, in advance for the 2 days (or even a week) so he could stay there until your place was vacant.You could also just be up front and tell the new tenant, "the old tenant has not moved out yet.

The tenant was very cordial and outgoing.