The $12 per month will make up in the long term if a claim ever has to be made.Sad to say the weather patterns are changing rapidly and we are in Tornado Alley, as well as we have pretty decent hail storms with great risks of repeat flooding in some areas.

@James Wise  Per your request.Coming out of the late 1800s most of the major west coast cities that we know and love like LA  SF  PDX SEATAC were all subdivided by the same engineering firms  at least SF and Portlandia were.. this led to land speculators in the day going out into the Western deserts and other remote areas.. buying what were large land holdings , Spanish land grants and other lands that were not govmit owned.. then in the day you could simply create massive subdivisions buy doing basic surveys off of the base and meridian lines.. which all of the west is surveyed off of... this is called section land.then create these massive tracks of lots.. some were like up in the apple valley, Lancaster,  Barstow type areas mainly 5 acre tracts.. and were done on a grid pattern.. streets in ( mapped but not built)  and of course spiraled out of a small little town off the railroad track or the few roads that existed in those days.. you took your map and recorded it at the county, county was happy they just got 5 thousand lots they could send out tax bills on..

kitchen is top of the line Wolf and sub zero all granite and marble you know the drill.My question is would you allow someone to live in this short term and would they trash it.. ???

Of course if this was a pattern it would be obvious.

So I tried following that same pattern by trying not to have much contact with tenants or potential tenants and just having my assistant be the go between for everything.

It's a duplex and needs a bunch of updating to take it out of the 70's...old windows, fake marble bathroom panels, plywood in 2 rooms for floors, etc. 

@Michael NievesThere are rules about occupancy when you use a VA loan.Intermittent occupancy due to work is okay as long as you can show that you have a pattern of continuous residency in that community...

@Doug McVinua yeah I agree with the pattern of development in Phoenix.

Examples:January electric bill would be named "2018-01-25 - Shocking Electric - 123 Sample Street - OWNER" (because it's an owner bill, not a tenant)Lease for Jack Squat: "2016-02-01 - Lease Agreement - 123 Sample Street - Jack Squat"I follow this basic pattern for managing over 300 rentals and it works very well.Another great tool is to use a scanner with OCR software.

Look at the pattern of payment.