The best strategy is to get a lender that will use your non taxable income, keep a high credit score, and keep your personal consumer debt down.

Then One tenant moved out and I re-rented the apartment at a healthy increase. 2 years later I did the same with the other one and within 4 years without much effort it was cash flowing pretty nice.I still own it today.

If so, that is not a healthy situation for a guy who owns rentals.

Overall, our market is really healthy right now and there just isn't a ton of distressed inventory that is coming available to people that aren't doing their own marketing or working closely with wholesalers.

With utilities the company would make sure they had a baseline of costs to estimate your consumption (in this example electric bills for the previous two years) and then if you consumed less than the estimate they actually sent you a check at the end of the year and if you had consumed more than the estimate you would just owe the difference.

There is a pretty healthy margin for something to go wrong and still be profitable.

The investor who wants out of real estate, to invest in something less active, time consuming or less risky, or to spend the proceeds on something else, does not accomplish his goals with a 1031 exchange.

I would look on Vrbo and airbnb at other similar properties in your area to see if this is realistic.Then you have some money for maintenance and upkeep, consumables etc.I would put all this in Excel and see how the numbers look.Then you can easily adjust numbers to look at options like a remodel or full gut of the house.You mentioned a pool so you'll want to have a professional pool company maintain your pool to limit your liability on the pool chemicals being off and causing a problem for someone.

Consume every piece of information on real estate and investing you can find. 

If you just want to be a boring "builder basic" flipper, use the same fixtures and finishes for years and years but if you want to set your flips apart and help them sell faster, you have to mix things up a bit and picking those finishes is TIME-CONSUMING!