I feel I have a good design sensibility and an appetite for numbers and these can hopefully help me succeed at this!

Most hired hands are going to burn out fast after they have to chew out a misbehaving sub the third or fourth time.Let me give you an idea from my perspective -We are a design build firm and handle projects including plans, design, permit, material logistics, payroll, book-keeping, ground/assembly management, scheduling, rescheduling, vendor management, quality control/assurance, and every other aspect of construction.We typically have about 5 'ground active' jobs, and 5-7 more in the hopper in some phase of planning, design, or permitting.To accomplish this, we have a meager staff of 2 designers (one of whom is a 20 year architectural veteran), a full time office manager, a full time site manager, a helper who splits time between being a carpenter's assistant and a gopher for materials, and someone who does scheduling and material takeoffs.

My area never really went thru a major downturn when the housing bubble popped.

Until the bubble breaks and you go broke because you only assumed the prices were going up and you assumed you would have no trouble refinancing.

Everyone from Boulder is getting pushed out of the "Bubble" and it's shooting up prices in the surrounding area.

Most of the other buildings and infrastructure on the island are of more modern design and development.

Have met with a high-end developer who proposes I bring the land (once I've torn down the house) and he brings the clients and design/GC/development.

For pure collecting rent purposes, I like to request them to go to my designated bank directly to deposit.  

So a little update, I checked in with my friend and found he did list his apartment on a website designed to target Americans.

I've also had a couple tenants who tried to sign up and aren't getting the emails so they wound up paying me manually.On the plus side, it's very easy to setup and you can designate multiple bank accounts so if you have different properties, it's easy to indicate which property goes to which bank account.