Long term residential rental real estate activity is passive, with extremely rare exception. In order for it to qualify as active income you would have to provide recurring services to your tenant that was directly beneficial to the tenant. (Yard care does not count for this.) For example, if you provide housekeeping services on a daily or weekly basis, (just like a hotel does) then that would make it active income.
Typically with long term rental income, all you do is "sit there" and collect the rental income on a recurring basis. You don't actually "do" anything on a recurring basis to actually "earn" that money. Therefore, it's passive income.
Even with something like an AirB&B rental, that too may not qualify as a SCH C business. Yes, you may clean the property between tenants to prepare it for the next tenant. But you don't provide services "to" the tenant while they are staying there. The key with providing services is:
1) Provided on a recurring basis
2) Must be directly beneficial to the tenant.
Laws on the AirB&B thing can also differ state to state as well as county to county. So what may qualify as active income based on recurring services in one state, may not in another.
