At this stage, you want to ensure that the property is cash-flow positive, meaning the rent covers expenses and leaves a profit.4.

Or in the early stages ask for more detailed financials for the last rolling 12 months, and come back with that data early in the process to weed out those who won't budge?

Home Depot's Preferred Pricing program, for example, can offer discounts in excess of 15% when buying that much. 

Good opportunities, early stage opportunities, may not have the best online presence, but be otherwise legitimate.Also IRR is a vanity metric, it's the wrong measurement.

I’m also at a life stage, where I’d prefer to just live with my partner and not rent out individual rooms in my unit.When I move out, the rental income would sometimes just barely cover the mortgage and taxes (usually not even insurance).

California charges a minimum tax of $800 a year per LLC, and more if you have gross receipts in excess of $250k.

We only pay the cleaner extra if there was excessive cleaning while a pet was at the property.

He quoted a 20% fee for managing each successful booking and suggested we improve the staging of the house, which he would oversee for an additional 10% of the total staging costs.

We will always have desirable locations that have more demand than supply and the excess supply will go somewhere.

As little as you can move money around, try to get to a place where you are just paying yourself out and adding owner contributions into the business (but at the beginning stages this is something that is needed)