Just like you, she can do RE as a side gig and learn a lot more while she keeps her own nest egg going and her lendability strong with a regular job.You should loop her into a major document with all of the properties and all of the profit and loss and go through them one by one and talk about whether to sell or keep, and also base it on geography for her and your collective choice of management.

Ultimately, if you're not considered a real estate professional, then you can only write off up to a certain amount against your regular income (25k maybe?).   

Regularly performing or overseeing maintenance and repairs c.

Yes, my mom would pay rent; or rather, I would be paying it but for purposes of the analysis I'm just assuming a regular tenant.

Add to that when you put <20% down, you're going to have PMI on top of the regular mortgage payments.

You can also take the profit first approach and make sure you are taking profit out of your real estate on a regular basis to do with as you'd like.

We regularly update it.

The #1 way real estate investors defer taxes to later dates is with a system called depreciation and bonus depreciation.Depreciation is the act of slowly, over time, deducting the initial expense of an asset against your taxable income.Generally over a 27.5 (residential) or 39 (commercial) yr time frame.So each year you can write off a few percent of the purchase price against your income. 

Normally this would be taxable. 

LTR:The STR loophole can be a huge tax advantage because you can use depreciation and other expenses to offset your regular income, which is a big win.