Are you willing to cut your nightly rate aggressively to drive occupancy rate? 

The ones I manage total to 20 bedrooms.These rooms rent for between $125 to $225 per week depending on room size and amenities in the room (beyond basic amenities may include: Desk, Tv, private entry, tenant controlled AC, additional storage).This month after padsplit takes their 14.25% cut of the revenue I am recieving, from the units I own, $15,230 from 3 homes.

They waste a TON on money shotgunning postcards and letters out to wholly unmotivated owners until they run out of money.The tip-off is that "buy-box" question.

Seems like you could very easily come out wasting thousands before even having a set plan in place.

As you can imagine, it drastically cuts down on the amount of water use when the tenants have skin in the game.

For the most part its just health and safety items, which are items we should have remedied anyways.As someone else mentioned, biggest thing to avoid is having the house tagged as vacant which the city will do if it sits empty for too long (handful of months, grass not cut, etc).

For us, we do batch showings instead of individualized showings; it cuts down on labor cost of having constant showings and it actually incentivizes competitions among the "applicants". 

@Rachel Chioreanu unless your project is an apartment building or Class A SFR, a GC is usually a waste of money.What you probably really need is a Project Manager from a GREAT property management company.What's the scope of your project?

If you have a portfolio/properties take a pay cut but REI will not be the shiny ticket out. 

Otherwise a total waste of time and money.Likewise entities, "building my team", "setting everything up correctly" and all that other fluff that benefits only people who set it up for you.