The plan is to buy a couple buy and hold single family homes that maximize cash flow and hopefully appreciate nicely over time, and continue to add to our portfolio over time. 

PM will give you a great baseline of practical skills for real estate investing i.e. handling leases, landlord tenant law, utility structures, maintenance, improvements, maximizing property value, keeping books, marketing, conflict management, working with contractors and vendors and a whole host of other skills and knowledge.

As other said, there are different ways to allocate the costs, so to maximize your depreciation, pick the "allowed" allocation that will give more value to the building. 

With the real estate market what it is today, I feel like I could better maximize my investment by exchanging into a business verses another residential or commercial piece of real estate.

Play with the figures until you get the right combination to maximize your profits.I hope this helps!

(The tax shield provided by real estate losses are maximized by growing your portfolio so that there are passive gains to be offset - at that point, contact @Yonah Weiss regarding cost segregation to maximize the tax write-offs.)

Just looking to learn everything I can so I can maximize my knowledge and minimize my mistakes. 

I would try not to reduce her payments, instead trying to maximize the "Snowball Effect" of making the higher payment along with your contribution. 

Get someone who knows how to maximize deductions and breakout the purchase price.

I also would like to find a CPA now so I can make sure I'm doing everything right from the beginning to maximize tax breaks, should I look for one local or would it be better to find one from Florida?