The house hacking idea sounds great on paper, but nobody wants to live next door to their tenants in a C neighborhood, at least not for very long.  

Is it terribly unusual to weed out unqualified applicants by requesting a paper application before showing them the property?

Many buildings in this era were built with a floor plan layout that doesn’t match the need of more modern generations. , i.e. 2 bedroom 1 bath instead of 2 bedroom 2 bathroom.

So the market is equally important when considering a self storage acquisition, and you need to underwrite it with ALL of the expenses for the facility, not the 3 expenses the seller shared with you on a scratch piece of paper. 

At first they simply asked for proof of transaction, ok easy, printed off a paper with me signed in showing the specific dollar amount sold and withdrawn to my checking account.

You should get to the point where you can run the quick and dirty numbers on a property in 15-20 seconds without a pen and paper.

Still getting used to the BP layout/functions.

I may try my hand at a flip someday, but for now, I'm happy just flipping the paper.

I'm not in love with the new layout but it was definitely the right decision to add another bedroom and create an open floor plan. 

On paper there are a lot that look great, but I don't have any first-hand owner experience there.