I appreciate the support and will definitely tap into your insight as everything becomes more cohesive with a solid direction- Happy Labor Day!

I never found a cohesive secret to finding great tenants there, other than "older people" was maybe the closest, BUT it sounds like you have a good or great IT job going, while I applaud your wanting to jump out on your own, be your own boss, etc and say to keep thinking that way, I'd HIGHLY recommend saving up a lot more $$$ reserves first, unless maybe as @William Hochstedler mentioned above, your the 1 in a 1000 superman, but that's hard for anyone to predict for themselves. 

@Trevor EwenI've been waiting for the "bubble" in much of Canada to lose cohesion for about a decade, yet somehow it continues to defy economic sanity.

This way you develop a relationship with 1 individual who spends the time quoting and blending all the coverage's into 1 cohesive program. 

(flooring, paint, fixtures, hardware, cohesive look, landscape etc...)Add holding costs ?

But, I don't know how to piece them all together to make a cohesive unit.

Having been on both sides of billion-dollar M&A deals, my experience is that when a company like Google makes a major purchase, the decision on whether to use cash or stock (or a combination of the two) generally has very little to do with macro-economics and more to do with the financial position of the company, the specific incentives the company wants to provide to the company they are acquiring, and the goals of the investment.Having too much cash on-hand can be a major liability to a company; while there are a number of reasons for this, by far the biggest is that it sends a message to wall street and to shareholders that the company doesn't have a viable investment outlet for the cash, and therefore doesn't have a solid and cohesive growth plan.Microsoft epitomized this back in 2004 when they were sitting on $60B in cash and ended up issuing a huge one-time dividend ($3 per share @ 10B shares) to dispense of half of that cash.Long-story-short, don't read too much into the fact that a company with a lot of cash chooses to spend it on M&A, versus issuing stock (borrowing money is rarely an option for companies with a large cash position).

So from the perspective of buying now how do I learn how to put all the pieces of data I collect together to form a cohesive picture of what the market really looks like.

the exterior would be just updating to make it more cohesive. 

If you've ever been to an awesome beer garden industrial conversion, odds are there was a design team that thought cohesively about that whole experience.