Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

Since your lender requires prior experience building and selling/refinancing a single-family residence (SFR) on your own property, you may need to adjust your approach.

City Hall want to keep small town small, does nothing to promote town Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

It also depends on how you hold your properties; LLC, S Corp etc... as to what the agent will recommend.

Did you require this or did they just get it on their own?

I would recommend making use of all the free resources available through BiggerPockets and the internet.

I'm looking for neighborhood recommendations in the Sarasota area for a short/mid-term single family or townhome investment in the 400k-500k range.

If you want to manage your own properties, I would highly recommend buying within an hour of your primary.

If you have equity and decent credit, a conventional Fannie Mae HomeStyle (or the Freddie Mac version) would likely be the better option instead of an FHA 203k loan (which will require a 3rd party HUD consultant to oversee the deal in addition to having the contractor involved). 

Point being if you are leveraged to the hilt with no cash how are you going to make those required repairs etc?