After a multitude of turn downs for Brokers in the Sacramento area due to the fact that I want to be an investor and not an Agent, I found (thanks to BiggerPockets) an online broker (REeBroker) that seemed to fit my needs well.

There are hundreds of posts on this forum with a multitude of "Tricks" that quite frankly, don't work or if they do, its a needle in a haystack.

There are a multitude of lending programs designed to help people at all stages of life. 

As with anyone posting publicly that they have a good amount of cash to invest, I wish you luck sorting through multitudes of DMs for the next year :I'd recommend you speak with a real estate / private equity friendly financial advisor first.

To address some of the comments, there are a multitude of proposed exemptions such as vacancy due to owner illness, owners on extended vacations, renos, etc.

If you compromise the structural integrity of the property, you will have a multitude of problems that will far exceed what your going to be paying for a permit (and what may come along with it). 

Houston, so I've read, has become a strange animal in the RE business in the last decade,  for a multitude of factors, so I can definitely say I understand there is a problem you're up against.

I have a long clause in my lease that describes a multitude of items that are not supposed to go down the drain.  

There are many IRA Custodians that have a multitude of free information on their sites on this topic or visit the official IRS.gov site.

There are a multitude of ways to participate in real estate by investing.