Value and rents should eventually increase to turn cashflow positive and build your wealth.You're next learning experience will be, now that you are out of day-to-day management, how will you be able to handle the inevitable expense challenges?

How do you handle scaling once you get your first property – is it as daunting as it seems, or does it get easier?

You don't have a property manager, because if you did they would be handling these duties.  

This will save you time and effort, as you won’t have to travel long distances to manage different properties or handle tenant issues.For your first investment, I suggest starting with 2-4 unit properties.

To them, everything takes "5 minutes" to do.The entire PMC industry has major challenges when it comes to handling maintenance, so it's a featured topic at most industry conferences. 

The house has needed some work done which the PM handled.

Be sure to hold a hefty reserve to handle on-going maintenance, capex, taxes, and insurance.

On the consumer side with QM I can handle conventional, FHA, VA, and USDA.

I'd have to ask my wife who handles the accounting etc about the fee question. 30 to 45min a month for 62 properties Not bad.

So, if deadline not met, we will send our people to handle.4) Vacant properties are easier to deal with, but we still require:- Owner must sign a Hold Harmless to indemnify us against any potential lawsuits relating to the work their contractor is doing and add us to contractor's insurance.--- Another lawsuit from a prospective tenant that slipped during a showing and when they grabbed the handrail, installed by owner's contractor, it collapsed and person injured.- Since we're not really in full control of the property, the Hold Harmless also indemnifies us against anything that goes missing at the property and squatters.We get asked/told to do all kinds of crazy stuff by owners, who either don't care what happens to us or haven't really thought everything through.Hope this addresses your question.