2) Do you have any suggestions for how to make this housemate selection process go more smoothly around lease signing?  

Here I used 3 month data which smooths out single unit sales on the price margins.

After some growing pains in the beginning, it smoothed out.

@Michelle Brast  I had a client that bought a DR Horton using their financing and it's been smooth. 

Key is you need a great team in place to make sure everything runs smoothly, everything looks great on paper, but in reality you will always hit road blocks along the way, navigating these is key.If you leverage correctly and have a good plan and pipeline in place you will grow extremely fast, especially if you continue to do value add on larger portfolios.   

Escrow is a third party company to make sure that the transaction goes smooth.

I got it for 25k and it took 30k to renovate and is breath taking i had the house sold even before i bid on it and we officially went under contract last month i set the buyer up with RMS Mortgage because i have always had such an easy time purchasing houses through them. all was going smoothly until the title search showed it was tax acquired and apparently in Maine they have 15 years to come back to protest which is so wierd. so i looked up options and research lead to find out i could ask former owner to give me a quit claim deed. basically the conversation would go ( hey guess what you could claim to have your house back would please let me have it instead and take time from work to follow me to the notary please?)

Everything looks super smooth.

Things like contract language, acquisition size and type, sourcing of funds and lender access are all things that will go much more smoothly if your broker knows about your 1031 and knows enough to work with the QI.

Airbnb reports the taxes in the area so it's pretty smooth sailing once you get everything up and running.