Advice needed: should we buy one house with cash with two houses with loans?

[Fan Bonnett]

First time posting here and looking for advice. My husband and I have a few markets that we are interested in buying and we have been saving like crazy. We now have a good chunk of cash. Our original plan, let’s call it option 1, is to buy a house in Ohio with cash. But after reading many posts here, I wonder if we are better off in splitting that cash into two and buy 2 houses (most likely one in Ohio and the other one in another state), let’s call it option 2. The second option obviously will require us to take on loans but we will have enough to cover 50% of each house as down payment. We also have 5 other rental properties in several states with 3 of them paid off already. I would love to hear folks’ advice to us. Option 1 or option 2?