All of this said if it is the home you are currently living in always claim the homestead exemption if it is available.

If you live for 2 years and then rent for 3.5 years and then sell, you can no longer claim that you lived in the property for 2 years in the last 5 years prior to sale because at that point, you would have only 1.5 years counted within that 5 year window.I know this can be confusing, let me know if you would like me to rephrase it.

It's those maniacs that buy homes cash via quit claim deed off of craigslist that really get screwed.Make sure your property manager is a licensed real estate brokerage.Google Clayton Morris and/or Morris Invest for a cautionary tale of what not to do when buying turnkey real estateUnderstand you can not eliminate all risk, only mitigate it.

Many times they will claim it's wonderful and then try to hide their worst deals by only showing completed deals.

And yes there may be liability to the landlord, but the standard policy explicitly states they only pay liability claims due to damages in their residence premise for the causes of loss of smoke, fire and explosion.  

As long as my debt/income ratio is good and after 2 years of landlord experience they'll let me claim my rents as income to offset that ratio. 

The authors always claim that they can do this in a minutes time.

And if you don't have time to do it yourself, well fine hire someone but RUN when they use landing pages without a link on it, or if they claim any crap like, the form needs to be above the fold, and the only thing they can do on the page is fill in the form.

If you are missing any of that you won't be able to process a claim so finding a servicer with a master policy won't matter.  

The county will very likely throw its hand in the air and if like most counties, will claim it disclaimed any and all liability on its website and that the information is provided to the public for tax information only and not for reliance by real estate investors.