Out of state investing can be tricky but you can easily mitigate most of the risk.

I live in LA and all I do is out-of-state.MOST IMPORTANT, way more than the other two: make sure in your journey that you really focus on learning exactly what risk factors are involved with any kind of investment strategy you are considering, and what mitigations for those would be.

Had a broker been involved, the deals either would have been nuked because a broker would have noticed they were bad to begin with, or they would have been fixed and losses mitigated.

The lack of ability to sell a loan takes away a great deal of risk mitigation.

What steps can I take to mitigate problems in the future?

I've built several businesses and applied reasonable risk mitigation otherwise I would never have attained the level of net worth that I am at today.

That's retirement, estate planning, and tax mitigation all in the same package.

May as well mitigate the additional risk while you have the chance.

It will cost way less than redoing your ceiling below. and will get done much faster with much less disturbance to the tenants, and in the end will probably be the most effective way to mitigate the sound. 

Being said that, Harris county is taking lots of action to mitigate that risk in the future.