Anybody have any experience running a small boutique hotel/motel? 

What has your experience been with the program?

You can always experiment with what you may be comfortable with to see what works best.Like @Shawn Parsh said, if you have other people looking for the type of property you want to invest in, reward them for their effort.

I'm nervous because I've never had a business before and I still have a full-time job as a cloud solutions architect, which I'm really passionate about - so hopefully it won't be my golden handcuffs that may prevent me to thrive as an investor and  I'm excited because of all the benefits and freedoms being a business owner offers, one of which is to connect and collaborate with forums like this and people like all of you, where I can both learn from and hopefully share later as I develop more experience. :-)

Would love to discuss in more detail with someone with experience in the downtown Phoenix class C market.J.J.

I got to learn from a mentor with 30 years of experience in my town.

And if so, what are people's experiences with reliability in an STR, Google vs Alexa?

@Scott EwellLeveraged vs debt-free is a personal decision to some extent.Leverage will give you a higher ceiling on your investment, whereas debt free provides the lower floor.While I can't say which is best for you in particular; I can say that, in my experience, every majorly successful investor I've come across uses debt in their strategy to some degree.

In my experience, here are the misconceptions uneducated and inexperienced note investors possess1.

I have found in my limited experience that I can work through the other issues, if the PM is doing their job and keeping their units occupied most of the time at market rents.