Meaning rent is reduced for say the first X months.

I spent 3 years reducing my expenses by over 50%, paying off all of my debts and growing a small nest egg.

This can reduce the impact from my item #1 which is the primary reason ADUs are such a poor RE investments. 

In my opinion, you're doing the same thing with your 13 cities. 2-3 days is better than 24 hours, but not by much.Would recommend reducing it to a city/week and setting up appointments to see several properties in each city, to get a better feel for where you want to invest and who you want on your team. 

I never worn the landlord hat and have no experience with what this transition would be like.I am definitely okay with taking a hit on earnings to reduce stress for myself and minimize problems.

I'm looking to house hack -- live somewhere, reduce housing costs in year one, then turn that property into an investment property in year two or three. 

As I planned to come into huge equity gain from the sale of my house I already know the basic of getting back to zero with taking out all the debt and I have been able to reduce my spending immensely.

I will write the property under my name and, hopefully, later would refinance it to pull out some cash.We're in a good relationship, so there are no worries regarding stealing money from each other or anything along these lines.My main concerns are tax-related; is that a taxable event, how much, is there a way to avoid/reduce it?

Understand the seller's motivation, be willing to forgo/reduce your commission significantly or pay your own closing costs  in order to get the number that works for you.

And also because sellers who haven't owned the property for very long no longer have any equity in the homes with these falling prices and are deciding to simply stay put instead of selling thus reducing the supply of homes available which keeps demand at a tolerable level.Yes I realize that long term historical mortgage rates tend to hover in the 6-7% range, but historical data is only useful data if we live under the same overall economic conditions as when that data was current.