Any advice or insights from your recent experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Quote from @John Underwood: Gas heat would require constant tank refilling and it would be very bad to run out in the winter.In my experience, if you have  325 or 500 g tank, you can top off in the fall and be good until spring.....Unless I guess you have a big house and are keeping it at 80d.... 

Can someone share your experience or point me to the right place?

I typically don't comment on other's businesses unless I know from personal experience.

Without an integration for some of our vendors, we are considering halting RentVine onboarding and moving to Appfolio.Any advice or experience stories would be welcome here.  

Why on gods green earth if you can save on commission, gain experience, meet investors and manage your own properties would you want to invest in a market outside of where you are?

I have some experience here, and my answer will be it depends. 

It can work if you have experience and a local team to help.  

It seems like you are either taking bad experiences that you have had, or things you have heard, and you are blanketly applying it to entire strategies that have worked and been helpful to tons of people. 

In our experience, the #1 mistake owners make when selecting a Property Management Company (PMC) is ASSUMING instead of CONFIRMING.It's often a case of not doing enough research, as they don't know what they don't know!