Any tips/suggestions on getting started would be great! 

7) What tips or advice would you give to someone cold calling for the first time?

I would generally try to avoid insurance claims if you can because insurance is getting out of control nationwide, and we are seeing in FL, TX and CA that claims can follow the house and/or you and make it very difficult to sell the home in the future.Within the mortgage expense category you have 4 separate charges: principal, interest, property taxes, insurance (if you escrow taxes and insurance which 95% of our clients do). 

We also own a single-family home with a detached garage and a separate lot that is currently secured with the mortgage of the single-family home (we've owned this for 10 months).

What are the Best Practices in Planning a Tiny Homes Community?

When house hacking, you need to allocate expenses and income based on the portion of your home used for rental purposes versus personal use.

We attempted to DSCR this property to pull out equity but were told by the lender (and two other lenders) that DSCR would not be possible given that the home is not appropriately zoned for how we are renting it.

no one drives buyers around anymore.. thats a thing of the way long ago past. they will drive to the home to open it up for the buyer..

Just to really drive the point home on how easy most of these owners are to find if you're using a true quality skip trace service, feel free to message me and I'll personally run a couple for you and send you full reports on the owners and possibly the owners' relatives if I see anything that makes me think you should be contacting relatives.  

Insurance is going to get more expensive, the government wants to keep people in homes, home equity financing is only growing in popularity, multiple generations are living under the same roof more, and all of those trends are going to lead to changes in how tax law is used and possibly the law itself.