His parents were the cosigners on the lease.I have never dealt with a collections agency, I am assuming that will charge a percentage fee of whatever is collected?

If you are doing conventional or agency financing, the lease will be added to your liabilities and included in your DTI. 

Have you ever worked with an Independent Agency/Broker?

I have had more times than not the agency say they did backgrounds and the tenant was good only to find out they missed quite a bit and the tennant wasn't good.

Owner-occupancy shall not be required if the owner is another governmental agency, land trust, or housing organization."

October 13th - Registered with Fund and GrowOctober 20th - Initial 1 hour consultation, they determined that I needed to wait until November 1st to apply for any cards because my last personal credit card would be 6 months old on by then.November 1st - they started the application then delayed by a week because my birthdate needed to be corrected for one of the credit reporting agencies.

I am very new to the industry. i'm wondering if i should join an investor focused agency or go the more residential route initially.

This is not the way to get a seller excited about working with you, to make it better he said he was going to send me an agency agreement for me to pay his 3%. 

So in my mind as an agent if your not the owner broker of your agency I would be talking to them and talking about if your E and O will cover you ..

Steadily operates an agency but they're mainly an MGA writing their own product.We work with that product and like it.However, I believe it's better to work with an agency that is totally independent and especially one where a knowledgeable agent isn't going to "mistakenly" write a worthless policy and leave it up to the policy holder to catch it after the fact.