The best offline model for recurring income

In your experience what is the best way to earn a recurring income in the offline arena.

I'm like a lot of other people and strive for automated recurring income. To me its the holy grail and although there are many ways to achieve this with traditional IM techniques such as adsense, info products, membership sites etc, it seems a little harder offline.

Sure people seem to be able to set up monthly recurring payments for stuff like SEO and website maintenance but this usually involves some kind of work in order to justify it - defeats the point really as its only scalable so far.

I suppose what I'm looking for is, as you would expect, maximum return for minimum time.

One of the best examples I have thought of is hosting. OK it's only $10 per month but it is truly hands off. You don't have to do anything to justify the money you are being paid. The down side is that to reach my initial goal of £1000 per month I would have to create and host 100 clients. Not impossible but wondered if there was a better way.

SEO seems to earn a lot more but there seems to be a lot more required by you to justify the payments. You have to actually do something. OK you can outsource the backlinking and all that but you still have to send reports and deal with and manage the customer. It's not set and forget.

I have thought of the rent a site model as well but I am very nervous about this as I believe that Google places is still evolving quickly and the dynamics of the whole local SEO thing is unstable. Considering the investment needed to get a site to the first page of google only for the rules to change again it seems risky.

If I could combine the ease of getting offline clients with the beauty of traditional IM recurring income models, I think I will have cracked it.

What are your favorite ways of earning hands off recurring income, what works the best and involves the least ongoing hassle from the clients? Your thoughts and comments would be appreciated thanks