He is disrespectful, had over 30+ liens and city fines from failing to maintain his properties.

Personally that would be a pain to maintain and do lol

To thrive in real estate investing, you must maintain a firm grip on your finances.

Cooking is huge so well stocked kitchen plus bbq.

The fact that you think the tenant is a pain has nothing to do with how you maintain the property, you could be creating legal and maintenance problems for yourself by not taking action. 

Plus, since they can cut and paint to size, shipping costs is less, and they stock way less material on hand.Imported treated pine lumber is astronomical since their pines trees were wiped out by the pine beetle and they also don't have a coating/impregnation process for the raw timber.

So the Janitor usually wins, defined as making more passive income than your expenses, because his expenses start off so low and stay low.Unfortunately, after you play it a while, you get to know what to look for, like when that one stock becomes available for, I forget, $3 or something ...

However, if you are an out-of-state slumlord, you can now pass 100% of the financial and legal liability of maintaining a property onto some poor local.

Focus on building and maintaining active income first.

To thrive in real estate investing, you must maintain a firm grip on your finances.