There is no magic number that can't be changed to make the investment look better than what it is.

If you find the magic answer for motivating the majority of agents, let us know. 

There is no magic pill, especially in this market.  

It just turns most folks into seminar junkies, who spend more and more looking for the magic bullet, crank up their credit cards(which they're sure they'll be able to pay off with the new found riches they'll make!)

"Magic Rental Formulas" are common with investors for sifting through the hay stack to find the needle, but an experienced investor is still going to crunch an actual income expense statement on the property before they put it under contract.Now the 1% rule of thumb completely depends on your market.

You might want to find an accountant that specializes in REI to answer those tax questions.Bottom line: the LLC doesn't magically solve all your legal problems, it takes a comprehensive plan and that plan depends on exactly what you want to do.

OR, do the majority of the people who buy at the back of the room expect the box to contain not CDS you actually have to listen to, but magical beans that will produce a line of motivated sellers with equity knocking on the front door and a line of buyers with cash knocking on the back door while you run back and forth between doors collecting checks?

You could try HomeAdvisor or Angie's List Property managers spend a lot of time, money and resources to vet their vendors, and a whole list of items owners never hear about because they are magically handled day and night!

They the turn their aggregated income all on paying off one property, get it done, and then move all their augmented aggregated income to the next property, get that done, and rapidly snowball all the money to paying everything off.There are all too many others, however, who base their business model on perpetual growth, think their spreadsheets are magic and will always work out month after month, smugly believe they've calculated for every possible manifestation of Murphy's Law that could hurt them, and just keep on acquiring and acquiring (and inflating and inflating their lifestyles) until something breaks their positive cash flow prediction model for a month or six and they go swirling down the toilet to a bankruptcy they never saw coming.When you owe someone money and you've committed to paying them over a schedule, there are always risks.

That is how I rent all of my self managed properties and it works like magic.