I don't want to cross any lines with the agent that I shouldn't be?

Have you considered getting a pricelabs subscription and getting a little more in depth #'s on amenities, management experience, review count, pools, view vs non-view, etc?

With certain banks, they can count your 12 months of rent, as long as they can source it.

If it is cheap I would do it but would not count on a huge ROI

As of late we've had to work harder than ever dotting every I and crossing every T to ensure we were hitting maximum exposure.

I am not totally sure it makes sense with a unit count under 10 but you can run the numbers and see what happens.

And, many of the RE millionaires I know have made their fortunes by buying essentially flat cash flow properties and then having them fully paid off in 15 years not counting the appreciation.

@Andre BrockRecommend exploring as many sources as possible to get referrals AND cross-reference them to get as much accurate information as possible.Check out NARPM.com, BP’s Property Manager Finder (BiggerPockets: The Real Estate Investing Social Network), etc.Also, encourage you to learn from the mistakes of others - by reading posts here on BiggerPockets about owners not having their expectations met by their current Property Management Company.

@Ashish Acharya thank you for your response, but I feel I'm still missing/misunderstanding something - you said "the IRS allows spouses to combine their time for material participation purposes", followed by " only one of the spouse's hours counts for the REPS status, which means only one of your efforts can count" - which one it is?

@Vishal ChandanRecommend exploring as many sources as possible to get referrals AND cross-reference them to get as much accurate information as possible.Check out NARPM.com, BP’s Property Manager Finder (BiggerPockets: The Real Estate Investing Social Network), etc.Also, encourage you to learn from the mistakes of others - by reading posts here on BiggerPockets about owners not having their expectations met by their current Property Management Company.