The owner is elderly and is wanting to sell her 3 bed/2 bath ranch style home for 300K (neighborhood comps are between 320-330K). 

G'Day everyone,I never in a million years did I think I'd be writing this but life and business can be funny sometimes.So we hated property management for so long because it's a very "thankless" gig.Tenants complain things aren't getting fixed quickly enough and landlords complain that things cost too much to fix lolAnd the property manager is stuck in the middle.Long story short, we had to set up in-house property management because that was the only way in our opinion to have a successful turnkey operation.Fast forward 10+ years and "what do ya know"We love PM....The residual and predictable income.The recession "proofness" of the business model.The value it offers to both tenants and landlords.And off course the profit margins once you hit an economies of scale standpoint.We have also fine tuned our operation over the years to almost perfection and established ourselves as the #1 rated property manager in Toledo.Systemize, optimize and monetize is what we did.We are now at a point where we could like to focus on mergers and acquisitions.Yep, I kid you not lolI'd like to buy other property management companies that don't know what they are doing just like we didn't I guess for the first 3-4 years.Looking to stay close to home in Toledo to start.I spent some time cold pitching local companies but they are all too proud to reply in their incompetent management style and prefer to continue running a scam.Any advice from other PM owner folks that are more experienced/advanced than we are would be much appreciated.Specifically on how to find an owner interested in selling.Grazie mille for reading and I'm looking forward to your reply 🙏

I am much more hands on in my learning style.  

Look into USFN.org, they have a ton of great resources on their site and also host webinars that teach you more about foreclosures.

It's mainly a marketing business, so focus on understanding marketing, deal strategies, and running comps before you get into the less important aspects like paint colors and flooring styles.

My question is, being my first investment home, should I bother with hiring some kind of designer to help with the material choices/colors/styles/etc or keep with the contractor and work toward a plan and scope of work that way?

I actually bought a fairly large lodge style cabin.

They claimed that their business was hit hard.The company then said they were going to have trouble paying the rent, please waive the rent or reduce it for a couple of months.Then they stopped paying.  2 months later we got instructions on their chapter 11 filing and we were to immediately assume the role of corporate airbnb style landlord. 

Low risk and high profits while teaching yo to be a landlord on training wheels!

I recommend the latter because it has practical information about all aspects of management, but it also teaches you where to read your actual state laws.