Property tax likely won't be that simple.

In my opinion it’s a simple decision sell your negative cash flow property and use the dead equity to buy another property that does cash flow.

@Seth PetersonYou are not entitled to a deduction for giving money to a property manager simple as a reserve.You are entitled to expenses as the property manager occurs expenses and bills you for the time/services/supplies.I.E. if the property manager pays $500 for a repair and sends you on the monthly report for $500 of repairs.

You can find simple mortgage calculators online, so start off by seeing if you will have a positive gross income after deducting the principle, interest, taxes, and insurance.

My original thought was to just charge them the $20 and pay the difference or to just pay the whole charge myself to keep it simple after a lot of prescreening. 

If you are expecting an agent to pick out specific properties for you and not just send all properties that meet your parameters you are likely to be disappointed, while it would be great if they did that, most agents won't and even if they would it would probably be better to wait until you are closer to ask.Agents take your criteria and put into into the MLS system and you get auto feeds simple as that U get every new listing that pops up that morning that meets your criteria .. this is how we buy property in many markets..  

BTW: it's not as simple as just "giving" it to him.

Simple. 

The elements that make a contract a binding contract are pretty simple.

I learned the first two from BP, the third is a simple fraction.