Seems too low to be real.

Some of the materials we choose and asked him to pick up (such as flooring) he replaced with low quality materials, I assume to keep more of our money for himself. 

Having the contractor relationship in place to move quickly and provide a high quality renovation at a reasonable price.

You can bring in more investors or use higher leverage if you are currently doing low LTV

I found a PM called Hostex.io for the STR so far so good I could not believe the very low annual fee which was less than $90 a year.

Capacity and Tolerance. 1) Capacity: how many people can you comfortably fit in the property, is there room to add more, or add more value to the tenants to increase rent.2) Tolerance: How many people are you comfortable living with, if there are vacancies are you able to handle that.House hacking is an amazing path to homeownership, and a nice low barrier to entry into self managing your properties.

They must provide quality service, or their clients won't want to pay the price.

Completely agree with you on this; I'm not making any claims to the quality of these lenders here.

You can also gain valuable experience virtually and offer low or no cost "co-hosting" services.

You may not need to visit each property you buy in that area though.4) Unless you are buying Class A turnkey, you should have a PMC.5) See below copy & paste info:-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Recommend you first figure out the property Class you want to invest in, THEN figure out the corresponding location to invest in.Property Class will typically dictate the Class of tenant you get, which greatly IMPACTS rental income stability and property maintenance/damage by tenants.If you apply Class A assumptions to a Class B or C purchase, your expectations won’t be met and it may be a financial disaster.If you buy/renovate a property in Class D area to Class A standards, what quality of tenant will you get?