RENT - Self-manage your empire, pick the best tenants you can find, treat them fair and honestly, outsource all the sucky work like clearing toilets or painting at turnover. 

However my long term plan is to minimize the hours I need to spend once I reach my monthly goal via automation and outsourcing. 

I try to do the easy value add myself and outsource anything that takes more than an hourthe “turnkey” work included:patching walls from nail and hook hole,cleaning out some trashadding smoke detectors to bring it up to fire codedeep cleaning and scrubbingdealing with building inspectorupdating some electric outlets and replacing outlet coverstouch up paint workand I had a contractor replace some carpet with vinyl plank flooring.given I could only work about 4 hours a week it ended up taking me close to a month to get it ready for rent.

However, after speaking with a lot of new and intermediate investors over the years, I understand this strategy is not best-suited for new investors that want to be proactive about breaking into the investment space.Lastly, I encourage everybody to outsource the cold calling instead of doing it themselves.

Hi all,I usually either do all the letters myself or have outsourced it to my VA> However, I am growing and can't manage all the letters and neither can my VA, but I don't want to hire another VA that I don't trust.I was going to use yellowletters for the first time, except it seems that the earliest day to ship out 123 letters will be July 7th.

However, I must acknowledge that there are some great, free sites and the list of course keeps expanding.There's a good argument in favor of outsourcing your skip tracing needs.

I focus on that and outsource or put off everything else.

@Larry Flanagan Both in-house and outsourced.

All those who have commented have made great points, and it has made me realize that outsourcing my marketing and acquisitions would still require significant time and resources.

A job that big makes sense to outsource for sure.One of the things I do to minimize mistakes is to break things down to smaller batches.