So one major repair can wipe out a year's worth of profit.

It creates a problem when selling the property as no one who wanted to live in the house would buy it, and your buyer pool for this property would be majority investors.

The majority of the contractors out there dont want to work for flippers .

Spending a couple of hundred dollars can reveal major issues.

Part of the value of the STR is that we will plan to use this property 4-8 times per year.The property is a few hours from the major metro that I live in, and is a vacation destination for lots of people in my area.

Columbus has become a major tech hub in the midwest with large companies like Intel investing $20 billion, Amazon investing $3.5 billion, Google building 2 new data centers: one in downtown Columbus and the other in right outside of U.S. 33 in Lancaster.I recommend working with an investor-friendly agent who focuses on cold-outreach methods like cold-calling, cold-texting, etc to bring you off-market deals.

Just based off statistics the vast majority of people (nevermind the vast majority of RE investors) will never replace their W2 income w/ RE income.

My sense is grand majority of MTR's are rented from tenants not in state or in the area for a showing anyway. 

Given current rents and historical expenses plus some cost escalation, I believe stabilized cash flow of $12k/year is a reasonable expectation excluding any major CapEx.

I would tell folks at the time with 30k brand new homes that Lehigh was probably one of the cheapest places in US if not the world to live everything considered US medical and fire and police etc etc and no state income tax.So here we are today de ja vu all over again with hundreds of investors stuck with half built houses and a the vast majority of all these were spec for rental purposes not to live in..