There were 5 other identical units for sale in this townhome neighborhood all listed at $210-215k so we wanted to stand out with the upgrades. 

I attribute part of the delay trying to find someone to lease/option the home for $950 for first 5 weeks ... once I opened it up to a traditional renter I found someone within three weeks at $750, one year lease.

You need to hold your own against the competition at a bare minimum and better yet, stand out.

You will stand out amongst the crowd, and you will be able to charge much more per night and have lower vacancy.

If debt-financed real estate is acquired via an IRA, any income attributable to such investment will generally be subject to unrelated debt finance income tax.5.

You do nothing to stand out from the crowd and frankly it comes off as cheap. 

I attribute this to 2 things that MOST Realtors don't do - 1. prospect/cold call for new business 2.

Let's say you have a spreadsheet with 300 home on it.Is there a place one can upload a, say a CSV file, and it returns the estimated home values, and maybe other attributes like square footage, for each listed address?

Step one: You have to stand out from the crowd.

I've logged countless miles in my personal vehicle that could be attributed to the house, but its not even worth trying to quantify (never mind create a paper trail).