One tip that I picked up here is while you are saving money for your investments, start driving / visiting areas you would like to invest in so you get a feel for prices, rents , house conditions etc, and visit and look at lots of homes and open houses so your eye get used to looking at repairs / upgrades that are normal in a particular market.

This is not a normal investing strategy we use as this deal just kind of fell in my lap.

This is normally what I use in my cheap flips, $.70 per sq foot at home depot.

Now that we are back to a more normal market here in CA I've joined a few partners in forming an aggressive hard money lending firm.

In other words, the drought we've been experiencing (which while intense the last 3 years has really been happening for the past 20), is not a drought at all, but normal precipiation.

Is this normal, or do I need to raise my rent?

If you may consider the above then you're probably going to want to have the VAFF (VA funding Fee) included in your rate instead of being financed into your loan because that will increase the cost of borrowing to you and your family in the short run.These percentages above are based on the loan amount so a 200,000 loan amount with 2.15% VAFF or VA funding fee is $4,300 dollars that would normally be financed into your loan. 

I normally charge two months deposit for tenants with bad credits, but they told me they can't fork up so much money at this time.  

That being said, I'd just make an extra effort to show up at that property more often that I normally would, just to keep an eye on the place and build trust with the tenant.

So if as a practical matter you have to run showings out of normal business hours why would admin tasks be any different?