The most imporant attribute of an agent to you is; AVAILABILITY.

To date, I have attributed half of the property tax ($7,500) to the rental unit and deducted these as business expenses on Schedule E; I have deducted the remaining property tax ($7,500) on my Schedule A personal deductions.

Your military service gives you a lot of attributes that will be of benefit, should you jump in. 

As I'm sure you're aware, construction costs are incredibly specific, with costs attributed to a multitude of line-items.

Catherine,Charging above market or having high move in costs could backfire, you may want to focus more on a screening criteria that rewards non discriminatory attributes.  

We have reduced the amount of problem tenants by taking what we learned with our terrible tenants and making sure new applicants don't have the same attributes.

Yes and it's about 98% because of BP.  1% from books and the other 1% is attributed to networking and learning the local market from other investors, realtors, and research. 

In 20 years, we never needed to call our insurance for that, however.We attribute that to NYC being in a sort of area where Natural Disasters do occur on rare occassions, but not as frequently as say, Houston or New Orleans, the Carribean, etc.

Where do you all put deductions that cannot be attributed to any specific house?

The use of debt creates a tax on the Unrelated Debt Financed Income that is attributable to the borrowed funds.