"Buy Low, Rent Smart, Sell High" by by Scott Frank, Andy Heller has a great easy plan for lease/options; and the richdad advisor book "The ABC's of real estate investing" by Ken McElroy was an excellent overview of apartment buying and building great wealth.

Now I'm married with 5 kids and look more like Drew Carey without the glasses(thank god for lasik surgery)I crack myself up sometimes :)

BOOM - YOU'RE HIRED.I could go on but you get the idea -- smart businesses are offering discount incentives for your money if you JUST ASK.

Never ever heard of a company paying the lost rents as well like Tim said (unless you bought tenant skip insurance) but who knows lots of companies do lots of different things.I see lots of companies allowing the owner to make the final tenant selection like James mentioned and although it's crazy from a legal standpoint (opens the PM up to discrimination claims) they all do it so if anything goes wrong with the tenant they can fall back on the fact that the owner picked them (which is pretty smart).

I want to make a smart choice.

In my opinion this is a smart move for the long term all be it is a very tiny step. 

The key is management as you have stated and you are obviously smart enough to bring that up as The Key.

and or deeds that are filled out but not recorded .. recording is not mandatory for ownership... its smart to do that lest someone does something nefarious . but not mandatory.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if holding onto it for a few years and then either refinancing or reselling would be a smart move that could still help us reap gains we could reinvest.

I want to know if it would be smart to purchase a decent looking Travel trailer ( 25' -30' for maybe $3000-$5000) and rent it for $500-550 a month.