I would recommend you focus on a couple neighborhoods that you would like to live in; and familiarize yourself with that market.  

You picked a great community to join.. have you checked out local comps to gauge the market vibe yet?

I sold all my SFR rentals in that markets as collecting rent and keeping houses in good shape was just too tough.. ( thats jackson proper)  as I said madison and Ridgeland will be fine..

By doing this we qualified for a larger mortgage because we could use the rent from the other tenant to qualify and there are better lending programs when it’s “owner occupied”.  

Are you looking at investing in Birmingham or other markets?

There is around 500k equity in the property. 150k-200k would get the property fully rented at top dollar with desirable tenants. 100k would get it to where I can rent all the units back out at fair reasonable market rents.

Sometimes I have even directed troubled tenants towards assistance programs (such as single moms because there are a lot of programs for them specifically in my area especially).

In the future I would like to run Facebook and instagram ads in a market that guest from.

Has anyone had good experience with Furnished Finder in your market or if in Houston even better?

In this case, your monthly payment with 20% down will have a good MARKET rate if your DTI works with a much lower month payment and no mortgage insurance(MI).