In California, residential rental property owners pay a flat 6% state tax rate on their total taxable income for the year (in addition to any federal taxes owed).

. $100-200k needs to be within a 15 min drive of me and I charge $750 flat fee ontop of the commission for under $200k to pay for my fixed costs.  

I know that in most of the markets I watch, 22 is now flat year over year, so you would be assuming 28% appreciation in just 2021 alone. 

They can tell you great info specific to your area.I live in Illinois, where due to SB 1872 passed in Aug 2019, they have flat out stated that you cannot wholesale more than 1 property per year without a broker license (our lowest RE license in the state, as we don't have agent licenses).

Screening services don't check everything.

I also screen the company owner (or President, CEO, etc) and they are personally responsible for damages.Nobody pays that much and then lets their employees trash a place.

And if after a while I have a portfolio of strong stable properties while working my day job, even better.Long story short, I could get 10% through stocks, etc. but the primary difference is that I take pride in seeing something physical in operation, vs. just numbers on a screen.

"$995 for a local apartment complex for which he claims never to have lived at.I am very new to this whole process so I have not seen many different cases or scenarios pertaining to screening or anything, but I can't seem to figure out how someone can be a previous home owner, approaching retirement, with 3 years credit history.

So, in my process, I do NO pre-screening and simply schedule 2 open houses per week.

And than we get into the "fun" things like how to operate a website that drives millions of traffic weekly, so one can actually FIND a tenant, the various software systems to pre-screen persons, schedule showings, operate lease signings, and on and on and on.