The best strategy is to get a lender that will use your non taxable income, keep a high credit score, and keep your personal consumer debt down.

Most investors opt for the 30 year loans when possible. 

With utilities the company would make sure they had a baseline of costs to estimate your consumption (in this example electric bills for the previous two years) and then if you consumed less than the estimate they actually sent you a check at the end of the year and if you had consumed more than the estimate you would just owe the difference.

The investor who wants out of real estate, to invest in something less active, time consuming or less risky, or to spend the proceeds on something else, does not accomplish his goals with a 1031 exchange.

I would look on Vrbo and airbnb at other similar properties in your area to see if this is realistic.Then you have some money for maintenance and upkeep, consumables etc.I would put all this in Excel and see how the numbers look.Then you can easily adjust numbers to look at options like a remodel or full gut of the house.You mentioned a pool so you'll want to have a professional pool company maintain your pool to limit your liability on the pool chemicals being off and causing a problem for someone.

If a car dealership makes an email list of buyers, and those buyers have opted into the car dealerships list to be informed of new cars as soon as they become available...will it be ok to but company name and/or logo that the buyer is affiliated with, on my car dealership page?

Consume every piece of information on real estate and investing you can find. 

If you just want to be a boring "builder basic" flipper, use the same fixtures and finishes for years and years but if you want to set your flips apart and help them sell faster, you have to mix things up a bit and picking those finishes is TIME-CONSUMING! 

Both tenants opted to leave at a slightly staggered schedule allowing us to address deferred maintenance and get tenant very quickly in at more than double the rent.The one we thought wouldn't clean did.

I'm getting extremely tired of living at home and opting out of college, while I don't regret it in the slightest, has made me that much more stir crazy.