Unfortunately, these things can and do happen on occasion, and it is the Property Manager's job to mitigate the damages by trying to charge the guest for damages (and many times this is unsuccessful), and get repairs made as quickly as possible to avoid further revenue loss.  

Commercial lenders use lower lending value to mitigate risk - you may have an appraisal completed but they determine the value. 

As far as mitigating tax impact, read this: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

With that, naturally I'm having my doubts - I don't want to throw my money into a home for the sake of doing it.I'm looking to house-hack since I'm in college and I can mitigate the risk of vacancy as well as get tenants I already know in the house - avoiding the bad tenant experience.

Here's a link to an article we wrote for BP about mitigating the risks of the 45 day requirement, https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

Others here have great advice and it will mitigate some of the risk.

I'd like to hear any success or failures you've had in doing so and how I can mitigate any issues to be successful.Thanks!

It's difficult for agents to mitigate issues without knowing the full picture.

These are a great tool that a lot of our clients use to mitigate the time constraints of a 1031 or move into a more passive real estate investment style.

There are some challenges but there are also ways to mitigate those challenges.