At the lease signing meeting, they indicated that they would be setting up automatic Zelle payments to go through a few days before the end of each month for future rent payments. 

Make sure it does the following things for you (this will also guard your friendship and help you learn good business practices):  ----1) accept security deposit & rent payments electronically (according to the lease) ----2) automatically charge late fees (according to the lease)Then keep to the lease and never accept payments outside of the free service like Apartments.comI hope that helps!

I actually house hacked in Houston myself by buying a triplex and living in the main house.There's plenty of duplex/triplexes in decent areas if you look hard enough.What I did when I bought mine was set up an automatic email from Zillow, filtered to the areas and property types I was looking for.

A while back, the neighborhood a large grocery store was in eroded very quickly.As they began to experience daily robberies and a lot of shoplifting they altered their hours from 24/7 to 7am to 9pm.They also upgraded the locks on the automatic doors so the emplyees would feel safe after locking time.A few days later around midnight, "a suspect" was arrested after shattering the glass in the bottom of one of the doors and entering that way.A cart full of canned hams was also found.

The house had a two car garage and was at the back of the little grouping of 6 townhomes (inside an automatic gate) so my house had an additional spot right out front (off the street). 

This meant that if anyone beat our offer, we would then automatically increase our offer up to $125,000.

It would be great to have automatic leads coming in so that I can become more familiar with my market, have access to more deals, etc... but the last thing I would want to do is waste an agent's time.

There are lots of reasons people would prefer to rent than buy and renting should not be an automatic “ they are losers” tag.  

Another option though, since you like the value-add idea...is combining turnkey with value-add--you fund the distressed property purchase and the rehab, and then you can pull the mortgage on it after with automatic equity gain since it's technically a BRRRR.

I also do public bank foreclosures, and tax deeds.I can set you up with complete access to the MLS covering Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco Counties, but will focus on St Pete.I can set up an automatic MLS feed for you too, based on your parameters, and provide CMA's on properties of interest.I use detailed investment analysis programs that you can tweak with different costs, growth rates, % financing, interest rates, etc. it gives you not only Cash on Cash Cap Rates but also true Internal Rates of Return.I do REO's including HUD and Fannie Mae.