In my experience, there is a very large portion of the investor pool that wants value add and understands what they are and how to evaluate them. 

You want to try to attract tenants who want to stay somewhere for quite a while, and you also want the property to be somewhere with a solid tenant pool so when a vacancy does happen, the vacancy period is as short as possible.

@Steven Pool   and @John Woodrich Thanks for the references 

Therefore, your potential rental pool is very small.My suggestion is to start looking for a multi-family property that you can "house hack," i.e. live in one unit and rent out the others.

If I leave it up to them, should I provide a lawnmower and put a storage shed in the backyard?

You would need to pool 3-50 properties that each have a loan of at least $50k against them and the total loan amount would be $300k. 

You can also partner with multiple people in one hard money loan to pool resources together.

There are excusions in the SEC code that identify vehicles for pooling fuds together just in the way you are describing.

Therefore, you're going to have a very small tenant pool.

I had good experience with American Home Warranty, they replaced a microwave and pool pump in one property, helped with $1000 (capped, so read the fine print) for a sewer pipe issue in another, pretty straight forward process both times. paid 4XX per property (respectably had one seller pay it).$75 Service  per call fee and the yearly fee seem ok for the value provided