Most buyers want their deposits account to be close to where they live.

If pest control is needed, the landlord at their discretion will order pest control and bill the tenant for the services or take the cost out of their security deposit.

@Robert Howard, to reiterate what @John Leavelle wrote, the "recent sales in area" might NOT be comps at all (ie. not SAME neighborhood; not SAME square footage; not SAME type of property), so averaging out THEIR sale price isn't the answer (unless they ARE valid "comps").What John is inferring about buying ARV-condition properties is that you'll likely have to save your OWN deposit for them - EVERY time (rather than be expecting to refi in 6 months to get your deposit back to Brrrr), because you won't be adding extra equity to them!

... meaning it looks like he may have given incentives like no deposit required to some tenants in order to raise the perceived value of the property.  

In a lot of cases, it's even written into the contract that if the closing is delayed for any reason (regardless who's fault), then the purchaser's earnest money deposit is forfeited.

Couldn't you link the bank account for that property to the Venmo profile so it gets deposited directly?

I am imagining a worst case scenario where we come to the closing table ready to purchase the property and the investor has cold feet and withdraws the money from escrow and we are stuck losing our deposit.4. 

Why would you WANT to put a higher deposit down than necessary?

In some of our areas the water is "hard" and creates problems with mineral deposits within the appliances.

If your bank has a lot of local branches, you can also ask your tenant to direct deposit their rent at the bank in your account.