-Ditch the duplex conversion and work as homeowner-as-contractor and renovate the SFR to rent out as one unit.

Lights/fans are cheap and provide a good return ditch the 70;s and do fansYes, you can upgrade some things and not everything. 

So I would ditch RedAwing and list it yourself.

Once we notified the neighbors, they cleared their ditches, routed the water properly, and the problem went away.You may have the same opportunity, but it shouldn't be your responsibility.

Plus, there's the new phenomenon, the "zombie homes" that the owners ditched thinking they'd be foreclosed on since they'd not made payments in a while but the banks won't foreclose on, since then it becomes their problem and as I've mentioned before, the city cracked down on banks maybe 3 or 4 years ago and started forcing them to bring vacant homes up to code (essentially a home in perfect shape is what's needed to truly meet code) but that kind of backfired when the banks figured out foreclosing on a trashed and stripped shell of a house in a low priced area was a bad move and now we have all of these zombie homes too!

The PM we had for some of our properties showed them to whoever asked-we decided there has to be a better way and we ended up ditching the PM-for a variety of reasons.We have also had our fair share of posers-people who work for Fair Housing and other gov't programs pretending to be prospective tenants and hoping to catch LL in the act of discriminating or whatever.Believe me they are calling you too.

“People are leaving and ditching their apartments, or leaving roommates hanging, or trying best to find a sublease or just leaving San Francisco and moving back home,” said tech salesman Anthony Natoli, who decided to move back to New Jersey with his parents after paying more than $4,000 a month for his apartment in Cow Hollow.

@Sheena LeeYes, the bus is in the ditch, and there's only one way to get it out of the ditch.

For instance if I mail a person a postcard and it comes back not deliverable thats a deal I go and hunt down because most people just keep on sending out postcards and ditch the addresses that have some bad data or whatnot in them causing the mail to bounce. 

I was listening to the BP podcast today and @Brandon Turner said something that I think everyone should absorb twice - he said "I don't worry too much about it because I'm willing to crawl through mud to fix a plumbing pipe or dig ditches."