Maybe give Dad a preferred return to reflect how much capital he has locked up on this deal.IE say property is worth $4m with no debt (keeping it simple), and cash flows $800k annually.

You can transfer the rental to an LLC after the purchase, though this may trigger the due-on-sale clause, so check with your lender.This post does not create a CPA-Client relationship.

I ended up locking in a 6% fixed rate and I'm glad I did because my interest rate would have doubled if I went with a HELOC.

The owner I know uses a local handyman service they've built a relationship with to handle one-off issues that come up and perform regular maintenance, and it sounds like you've already got cleaning locked down. 

You may need to spend a few hundred dollars to get a lender name change if the new lender requires that, but depending on when you rate locked you may still end up saving money with a new lower rate.

From there, if you can find the house that needs basic rehab and lock it up for around 50-60% of that ARV, then you’ll do just fine most the time.  

And you have to live in the same unit as the guest, bedroom doors cannot have outside locks, and you can host at most 2 guests at a time.

I have had to replace door locks when people kept jamming the wrong key in.

Having family there and a pretty good market, time to pull the trigger. 

That comes when you've started looking at properties you could actually buy and you start over analyzing because you're afraid to pull the trigger.I experienced this in a different fashion when we bought a property and we were gutting our first kitchen and I didn't want to pull the trigger because I was a little afraid of just ripping everything out and what would actually happen.