You don’t have to do work as a landlord?
When things to break or need service (usually a few times a year something minor pops up), my involvement is approving a repair or calling on a company I have used prior to take care of it for me. I have service providers for each property that maintain it for small fees, so like lawn, pest, sprinkler, AC is all taken care of on preventative maintenance plans.
I did have one home we sold at a loss because of the housing crash. It sucks, but it also taught me a number of valuable lessons, and really improved my game.
With real-estate, there is a cliche saying, you make the money when you buy the property not when you sell. This is so true. If you buy it right, you will do well, when you buy it wrong it will almost always bite you.
Flipping is an easier place to lose money if you aren't careful. But if you are flipping you aren't doing it for passive income. I do like flipping but it is not passive and in my area has been hard the last few years because of the local market trends.
I actually set things up slightly different but essentially it follows the same process. I have service providers I negotiated and setup that manage different aspects for me, so most all I have to do is make an approval or call and I don't have to pay a percentage fee each month. I learned how to do this after I had a bunch of properties in the past and was paying 8-12%/month in fees for each property but all they were doing was making calls on my behalf or setting up service providers to do it. Once I figured that out, I setup all my own service providers once and cut out the management fee. There are even people that cover the stuff like evictions etc as a service so you don't have to be involved on it.
It requires maybe a few hours of my personal time every couple of months as an average.
Plumbing I found through trial and error, and to be fair for any job where I see a bigger repair bill, e.g. > $500 I'll generally get quotes to keep everyone honest. There are exceptions of course, but when I start seeing bigger repairs being requested it sends up some red flags because we maintain everything really tightly.
Our lawn service and our pest service are the same ones we have do all the units and our own home too. We found both of them through a referral and tried them at our home first. Then slowly gave them more.
I actually found out that in many cases my background checks were catching stuff the rental agency did not which really pissed me off. I use the local sheriff's office to run the background for $20, and then credit check with an online company for $15. I get a true picture of the person/people this way, the rental agency wasn't doing a background check, it was only a want/warrant check and credit check. I prefer knowing the background of people and being able to deny for valid concerns, like the one I found out had been evicted from their last 3 places but lied on their application about prior evictions. The real estate company running my old checks would have never seen that since they just did a wants/warrants check, but I did and denied these people the rental for lying on the application about prior evictions. That said, I had a young family rent a house from me one time that had been evicted and gone bankrupt the prior year. They never lied to me, were honest as best I could tell, and upfront with me about everything so I rented to them after meeting with them. I only required them to provide a full months rent as security instead of a reduced amount, which they totally understood. Never had a problem with them and they got their security deposit back cause they took care of everything.