You asked about short-term rental property demand and mid-term rental property demand in other areas besides yours and thoughts on managing these properties.First off, short-term rentals are a great property class to own, especially if you "materially participate" with 500 ours in the management of your property for the IRS to consider it an active investment and able to write down your active or W-2 income with the expenses, bonus depreciation, and cost segregating the property for additional depreciation to reduce your income taxes.There is short-term rental demand in many communities in Michigan because we have so much coastline and natural beauty as well as university, business, and hospital stay demand.

Any additional investing strategies and advice that you can recommend for someone just starting out? 

Additionally , thank you for sharing the process your Applications Department uses!  

We only require a cleaning on move-out but we give our clients the option to require mid-stay cleans since that would be an additional expense for them. 

You didn't mention this explicitly, but in case you haven't already done so, make sure your numbers include some projects being more expensive than originally quoted, additional problems discovered along the way that also must be repaired, new problems created by fixing earlier ones, etc. 

Only tap it to improve those 3 properties - and only improve if health & safety issues or if it will correspondingly increase rents.Do NOT improve the properties like you'd live in them - just, MAINTAIN TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.Many here will try to lead you into tapping the 70% equity for additional purchases.- Without knowing what you are doing, this could be a disaster that leads to you losing everything:(Better to learn how to manage the 3 you have and IMPROVE operations to improve cashflow. 

Separate “must-do for safety/function” from “nice-to-have to increase ARV.”For BRRRR, the only things that must be done upfront are the items an appraiser, inspector, or tenant would flag as functional or safety issues, plumbing, electrical, bathroom addition, paint, etc.

Seriously though, they will want additional details.There are hard money lenders who don't require all of that data but they want you to put down 30% of the money to buy and they will provide 70% at a high interest rate.

A realistic timeline is 45 days for approval then an additional month for inspections/ reinspections and move in.  

Opening bank accounts, insurance coverage, distribution of earnings, bank account signatories, hiring, additional equity infusion, first right of purchase, placing of liens and collateralization, investor payroll approval, etc etc.