I am currently educating myself in real estate investing and practices.

Unfair or deceptive contact by the holder of a tax certificate to a property owner to obtain payment is an unfair and deceptive trade practice, as referenced in s. 501.204(1), regardless of whether the tax certificate is redeemed.

If so you can try to get the tenant leaving to pay that as to avoid being on the hook for an eviction or collections if the tenant who remains stops paying the rent.

PM collected rent and ran away.

.#5 Practice, Practice, PracticeWalkthrough potential rehab properties (or find properties virtually online) and practice creating detailed scopes of work, quantifying repairs and estimating rehab costs for the projects.Once you get some experience estimating costs or get a few rehabs under your belt, you will be able derive your own 'formula' that you can use to quickly estimate costs and analyze deals.  

I have a personal policy to never renting to anyone  that I can not collect from.

The operating company takes on all of the liability that would otherwise blow back on you including: paying property management, paying contractors, collecting rent, marketing, etc.

At tax time you would be able to write off the interest expense and the lender would pay taxes on the interest income the business collected from you.  

Big problem is often in collecting the tenant paid portion.

The biggest thing at this point is to get practice analyzing tons of deals.