My owners hired our company for a service therefore it was my duty to ensure that they understood all expenses, repairs, etc. 

The perk of starting a team is hiring staff or admin to make it easier to scale then bringing on agents.

That's a fancy way of saying they will hire someone cheap.

Hire a Property Manager for any rentals that you acquire.

He's an investor that owns rental properties too and is the only person in the scenario who doesn't have stakes on contractor costs/whether I buy the house or not (I hired him directly, not a realtor referral) and intimately knows the structure situation.

Realtor was not honest about the septic company he hired to test the system.

Paying the subcontractors means you are hiring them.

If they aren't asking to be added to your policy or aren't adding you to their master policy, then that means they have zero liability coverage.What kind of incompetent PMCs are you hiring, that don't know enough to make sure they have liabiity coverage?

Since they all follow the same guidelines, and it was an unbiased 3rd party, there is significantly higher chance your refi numbers will come out closer to what was expected than just trusting Realtor opinions (after all - banks don't hire them for an unbiased evaluation of homes prior to lending). 

The scale of commercial real estate enables us to hire people to be boots on the ground and handle the day to day.