As supply increases, demand decreases, which can eventually lead to lower prices if done on a large enough scale.Unfortunately, many people outside our industry don’t fully understand this.

Warren Buffett has a great quote that I am going to butcher right now, but effectively he said something along the lines of: successful people make a list of the top 10 things they want to do/accomplish and rank them in order 1-10. 

Quitting your job to do real estate full-time is obviously attractive.You could listen to all of us telling you not to do it, but sometimes you just have to take a chance and make the best of it.There's a lot of successful people that didn't know they could fail and succeeded despite the odds.

Well they have been the only people responding to me via email.

The idea is to find motivated sellers and help them through the selling process either off-market (wholesaling/investor purchase) or on-market (hands-on coordination, cosmetic prep, referral to real estate agent).

Another caveat: there are a lot of STRs out there that are breaking HOA/local government/state/federal laws or strongly bending the rules, and I'm looking for people who did not do that or who mitigated risk there. 

You could increase the timeline and possibly save money by having other people do some of the work.

2- what is the percentage of people that get audited my claiming REPS status to offset W-2?

California’s going to have their hand out as well.

Most of the passive investors here would recommend reading The Hands-Off Investor by Brian Burke.