Those are always tough issues for me because in a sense its almost normal wear-and-tear yet the next tenant isn't going to prefer a large chip because it probably looks trashy.Although I have a long, long history of fully refunding deposits, I'm beginning to change.  

We are attempting to do it ourselves this time.I've been told to verify credit by contacting at least 3 of their creditors and seeing their payment history. 

If you have a successful real estate business, they may give a LOC against your LLC with or without your personal credit taken into the picture depending on if your business has developed its own credit history.

After researching the renter, I found they had a solid history of county licenses for the business and there were ongoing in-home checks through the county to ensure that the living conditions were in good order.

However, the property only has 1 year STR history.

However, the property only has 1 year STR history.

This is very generalized and I'm sure there are exceptions to that rule but there is a lot of history related to the courts that you can research more into that have kept them less desirable.  

The most recent models have resistive electric heating elements for those cold snaps, but in eastern MA, we really don't see those very often.

He said sure, so we put together a 4 page analysis on the Carolina Beach STR market, the comps and metrics for his property in terms of occupancy, average daily rate, seasonality, etc, and we shared what kind of value we could add to his property in terms of equity with a strong rental history.

You can also have them sent you alert every time someone access these locks, you could enable this setting for empty property so you get alert as soon as squatter is in.2) Security cameras: Make sure you buy the ones that upload stuff on Internet and have motion detection at least and offer upto 30 days video history (or you can create a setup to download video history from Internet to your personal local drive.