If you know your stuff, are willing to learn, and can effectively and efficiently evaluate deals, there is no reason why age would prevent your success.

@Cameron Riley Move in fees seems a little unnecessary and potentially a barrier to qualified tenants.

You can't always prevent it from happening, but unless you really trust and know this owner, trust your gut.

It's probably unnecessary, but I would also say you could put something in the new lease stating that any existing rental agreements with current or prior owners are explicitly terminated with this new agreement.

I will take uncle Ben over a money order or cozy payment any day of the week plus I can look into my investment while I’m there and confirm everything is going smooth which is how you prevent big problems down the road .

IDEALLY, you want to split up liability between every property because if there ever is an issue with a single property you have "stop-gaps" that will prevent a devastating lawsuit wiping out your entire portfolio (and you personally.)

Terry, How do you prevent length of ownership and loan balance from forcing sale?

Also make sure that the maintenance fee delinquencies are not more than 10-15% because banks typically won't give an investor loan if they're over 10% or an owner occupant loan if they're over 15-20%, which can prevent you from getting financed and prevent values from going up. 

I used to be a very caring landlord,responsive and of course proposing a great house in Good condition,but for 2 years I was almost not sleeping at night thinking an accident/personal injury/mold related health issue could happen and consequence of this would be them suing me for eventual High medical bills or else,which could mean losing one or more of my single family homes as they were all under my personal name,The point of my post is that it seems you cannot follow a "by the book equation" that would 100% prevent you from this to happenOkay I had the biggest umbrella policy up to 5 Million in coverage,but I have a limited trust into insurance companies,I can easily imagine them finding a way to not cover the problem if needed with some clausesI always was specially paranoid about MOLD,especially with the houses being in Florida,although the premises seemed to be totally ok at move in,you will always be told that there are some mold in houses in general,so the situation could quickly change without you noticing even with constant control,I add a very nice old couple as tenants but at one point they were telling me they had health problems because AC was not working for a day in order to have it fixed quick(of course as usual I respond or act fast to resolve the issue but this just ringed to my mind what could happen if they would get very ill and need to pay a crazy medical bill...)

In CA, reserve study is required every 3 years to prevent this from happening.