Their insurance has asked me to return the month's payment for the remaining days of their rental (Unfortunately, I did not have a cancellation agreement).I am unsure how to handle this situation, especially since I couldn't fill the majority of the rental dates and had to offer discounts for the days I did manage to book.

I learned it was possible to buy investment properties and manage myself from a distance.

I have 3 homes managed by a property manager.

Easy to dump a lousy rental, but impossible to get back the time we wasted in managing it.

As for the rest of it, you can find a lot of useful tips on past forum posts along with podcasts and youtube material on the topic (BP and other RE sources).We've self managed STRs for a few years.

You would have to self-manage though, as paying a property manager will eat up most of your profits.

I used Hostify and you can work it into the management system to figure and charge all of that for you.  

It's low class but some managers I know make s killing.houses are in poor condition since they were built quickly in 1946 to house the returning soldiers from the war👍 

They use more expensive subs because they don't have to manage the project. 

But yes we do bifurcate our portfolio and manage it to make sure it’s well balanced as well and not teetering too far one way or the other.Chris, I never knew about SEC audit.