After years of self-managing our single-family rentals, we decided to hire a property manager to provide full service management.

You'll likely also reduce your cost of living by moving to a stabilized apartment.Depending on the cashflow and debt paydown, you can use this strategy until you've built enough equity to reinvest.On the other hand, getting into a multi-family after refinancing will also help you build substantial equity to rinse and repeat in the coming years.

Is there any creative way to avoid/reduce capital gains tax on the sale ?

At a 7% annual return, this could grow to $908K after 10 years, providing immediate liquidity and diversification.Alternatively, holding the property could yield $825K net equity after taxes in 10 years, assuming a $900K sale, with the potential to defer taxes via a 1031 exchange if reinvested into another property.

Again, I’m not sure if these guys do this to everyone or if their customer service ability as partners is just terrible.

I used Roofstock to sell one of my rental properties in TX as their sales commission is lower than going through traditional sales channels. 

$77,000 earnings on a $190,000 investment is unheard of in real estate, but quite normal for a well running business.New RE investors are always after cash flow and CoC return.

Purchase price: $350,000 Cash invested: $10,000 Sale price: $435,000 Primary residence converted to a rental after 2 years.

I’d simply ask in what situations where the broker and the brokers firm did nothing to facilitate the sale do you think you should get paid a commission?

Not too bad when the inventory is low, the number of sales is low (like a 30 year low), interest rates are high and prices are high.