All expenses must be paid from retirement funds. ( You can't use any personal funds or credit cards to pay bills on the rental). 

Currently, my main bottleneck is going through hundreds of leads to qualify them before I spend the time running numbers; it would make my life easier & the business a lot more efficient if I had a VA who I could train to go through/qualify the leads for me so I can focus on the valuation/reaching out to homeowners.

I have personally seen this come to 30-50% of the value of the home.

It almost seems to good to be true to be able to get the same returns as a Certificate of Deposit.https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/best-high-yield-s...

FWIW there's locations here in CA where you can (in person) get fake DL, SS card, I9 cert, smog cert etc.

The more desperate a person is, the more likely they are to pay this fee.

So instead of driving around you can use pin to find the property and the person.  

But, personally I wouldn't start the renovation until I'd had done a background check on the person who lost the property, to see if they have other assets they could sell to redeem the property or relatives who might help them out. 

They've been a life saver, and have provided many updates and repairs to my home to maintain the value and quality of the home.

The reality for many is that life gets busy, the half-day trip to the property is difficult to cram in, and that property management is tough.