My taxes are overly complicated and worst of all these houses really only break even for us every year.

It's complicated and poses more risk.

Sometimes these deals are easy and smooth and everyone agrees, nice, and friendly, and then sometimes when they look easy, they end up way more complicated. 

This can be an effective technique with a single-family home. 

Once the investor understands these three FOUNDATIONAL aspects of real estate investing, they can comprehend the creative and wealth building techniques and strategies and successfully apply them to individual deals.  

You'd need to enlist one anyway if you go through with the 1031, so asking someone who really knows the ins and outs of a complicated transaction like this would be a good first step.Best of luck!

Reminder too that once you get more properties under your belt and begin having a bigger real estate investor portfolio your file begins to get more complicated and even a simply loan like DSCR sometimes may ask to prove other items.

However, the more complicated something is, the more likely it will go wrong.

Many techniques we discuss here (like brrrr) are ways to combine 1 and 2 to get higher returns--but we should not deceive ourselves brrrr is a combination of a construction business with real estate investing.

Once you have that experience, and knowledge of the market, that's the time you can get into more complicated rehab projects.