Suddenly more and more people were sticking around.

Even if you are planning to manage it yourself, account for the cost of management when analyzing the deal. 1) Your wife's time is valuable, so consider this as money being paid to her for her time rather than a "savings" of not having to hire a 3rd party. 2) You might decide that you're not good at property management and need to hire one. 3) Your situation might change (birth of a child, divorce, disability, moving for work, etc.) and you won't have time, ability, or proximity to manage the property well if at all. 4) You might get to your passive income goal 20 properties down the line and decide you want to go sit on a beach and drink Mai Tais, but when you go to do it, suddenly a big chunk of your cash flow goes away because you never factored it in from the beginning. 

Cordova looked like the place to live up until 2008 and all of a sudden everyone found out they were severely underwater.

Now in 2018/2019 at the top of the cycle, he is suddenly active and now everyone else on the sell side is the unsophisticated sucker while those same sellers are making 4x on the real estate he buys.

When you consider the time and expense in getting them out, suddenly that extra money you were making per month in rent evaporates very quickly. 

All of a sudden a structural engineer says it's a $7,500 fix for "support."

They were also fickle and would suddenly lower LTV on my friend (an excellent credit) for no reason very late in the deal.Maybe @John Smith can give more factual details on recent government measures?

She just got a surge in views for the day.

(I know that might be a silly concern, but it just suddenly popped up) Many people have told me about the "untrustworthy" folks in this industry I guess that's why this concern came to me.2.

So I asked for verifiable proof of funds and suddenly he was caught off guard acting as if he didn't know what I was talking about.