If your rent is competitive with others then don't be afraid to keep it competitive.One thing where we often stumble is that small portfolio landlords tend to lag market rent significantly.

I tend to admonish about automatically doing 1031 exchanges. 

It tends to draw very troublesome tenants. most of em end up as crack houses with a lot of maintenance problems and expensive turns. 

Bad locations tend to be flat or trend down.3.

The ROI's tend to be in line, just less seasonality component.

That experience tends to align with what I'm hearing from other folks on-the-ground that have been doing this for decades.

Same goes for number of LLCs and what to fund them with, since bear in mind that CA tends to be more cumbersome and expensive to have LLCs than other states. 

As I do tend to see quite a few OOS real estate investors posting on this forum.

The homes in Southlake, tend increase in value making is a great location for investments.

The trend I've observed over my career, having assessed over 1000 MF transactions the focus tends to be predominantly on the Net Operating Income (NOI), rather than the replacement value of the asset.