I usually place a realtor between me and a Buyer or Seller, take a referral fee, and have the agency participate in post liability issues.  30+ years doing business and no problems but it only takes ONE and if you are licensed, you reduce the risk and improve profitability.  

My preferred methods: Money order not likely to bounce difficult to cancel (although many have limits)Online rent collection easy to trackauto-pay to reduce late payments

I will sometimes test the market at higher rent prices and reduce to get it rented.

Just like you, I didn't see any point in wasting my time on hundreds of calls or emails from tire kickers and this process has greatly reduced the amount of time I spend on people who I don't want and has quite honestly reduced the pain and suffering that is a large part of filling vacancies. 

As Michael mentioned, there are some unique opportunities where seasonal rentals can bring $2,000 - $5,000 a month but that is for four months and many of those are in HOAs and rules limit the number of rentals per year, have a high carrying cost, and it is difficult to find a renter who only wants 7-8 months in the off-season, even with a reduced rate.If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

Charging lower rent does not reduce your expenses and charging higher rent will usually skew the vacancy factor.

The only possible solutions that I've come up with is to: #1 Buy a house with an oversized lot, flip the house and subdivide the lot in hopes of bringing your land costs to zero #2 Buy a small subdivision and divide in an effort to further reduce land costs #3 Reduce minimum profit even lower (unacceptable)#4 Buy materials in extreme bulk to receive deep discounts.

And you use it to reduce the gain when you sell.If you have multiple rentals and you sell one, you can use all the carry forward losses from all properties against the gain on that one sale.I do agree there are other strategies besides immediate cash flow from a rental.

And yes some people do feel like they can pick and choose parts of a bid, which sometimes is the case but not always.I did give itemized bids still so they could see why I was charging what I was, if they didn't like it we can discuss or I could just have said take it or leave it or adjusted my number accordingly for the reduced amount of overall work I was going to receive.

The Republicans have a plan to reduce the deficit?