Out of curiosity, how long after a guest leaves do you or your cleaners check on the property?  

Without going into too much detail, my current situation stems from selling a previous company via partial owner financing, only for the new owner to default on the purchase, leaving me in this position.For traditional financing, I understand I’ll need at least one, if not two, years of solid credit history, tax filings, and other financial documentation.

I would guess that you have little or no experience running any kind of STR, and now want to get that experience on the back of someone else's investment, with little or no personal skin in the game, and that's not a good way to build an investment portfolio.

I don’t mind having skin in the game either, but I know using private money is key to scaling one day and would like to get some experience with it now, even if it doesn’t fund a majority of the deal. 

QB really is not made well for landlords and landlords leave QB every day for better software, payment processing is really expensive, and with QB there's no tenant portal for your tenants to schedule payments or push maintenance requests. 

CA ranks in the top for people leaving the state.

Personally in this year alone I've helped clients get through divorce, leave their job to care for an elder parent, and leave the country for a mission trip with a cut in pay.

I was looking to put 80k cash into then refi afterwards and possibly getting 130k. 130k on mortgage would be close to $800 only leaving $200 in cash flow each month. 

Second, I let the tenant know I know their criminal history and tell them to leave.

If it was long term yeah you can make it clear upfront as a take it or leave it.