Brokers, law firms, accountants, advisors: they should have a proven track record of professionalism, knowledge, experience and network.

If you have a good credit history and 25% cash down and sufficient income obtaining conventional financing for up to four houses is actually very easy.If you don't have the above requirements, then you scramble to put together any deal until you have proven success and proven track record with which to attract private financing partners.Hard money borrowing eliminates many otherwise profitable transactions since the profitability needs to be much higher to pay the hard money rates.The hurdle with conventional financing is about 5%.  

But the bottom line is that if you have crummy credit, no track record, and no cash you are not going to be able to start in the fix and flipping business. 

Property Management is an excellent option for some; although, I would only recommend it if once you have more properties than you want to keep track of or if you are investing out of state.

Since you can keep adding new "pages" (business cards) to the PDF you've created on the app, you can just collect images of cards and then email the PDF to yourself at the end of the month.I do the same to track receipts, too.

Would I need to track down the manager of the HOA to find out if there are any unrecorded HOA debts?

I have a one page spreadsheet with all the companies and properties to keep track of things that need to be  done.

You naming off a bunch of random bad news highlights that happened doesn't mean much except that bad things DO happen in Baltimore and that you're really good at keeping track of the negatives, nothing more. 

Their company has been growing and they are on track to build 40 homes this year.  

As I said, one of the best ways to get started is to do a great deal, and start establishing a track record.