It’s normally the investors sitting behind a computer who fail to recognize this.

If the room is a mess when she leaves or she's not paid part of her rent, then remove that as you normally would from the deposit and return the rest to her. 

You can recover damages from a security deposit, but you cannot recover normal wear and tear.

The one who owns the house will normally dictate who will report the activity on their return.

One thing that might be causing an issue is that the house has a cesspool (normal for this area) that's less than 100 feet from the well, so due to FHA standards we can't sell to FHA buyers, just buyers with conventional financing or cash. 

If this is something you are trying to unload to free up some capital or time, then it may just be worth figuring how much furniture you have, assigning a cost, then see how long it would take at the normal cashflow for that furniture to pay for itself and start making the new owner money.

The numbers are normalized to the ARV and the math doesn’t care.Lastly, if you are not borrowing your costs, or can somehow avoid sales commissions, then of course you can pay more, and you can’t use this rule of thumb.

@Fiona HumphreyJust make sure the property cashflows if the owner of the business dies and you're forced to rent to a normal everyday tenant.

Trying to weed people out at local REI meetings to be possible mentors is also gamble and a huge time suck.

To depend on the rates to drop substantially to cover refi cost is a gamble.