If I'm in your shoes, I recommend chatting with some local investors (attend a few meetups) to get a good sense of whats possible and not based on others that have a similar W2 scenario as yours. 

We take this to mean (based on 100s of real tax court cases) any activities integral to the business of running a rental.

If you'd like to connect over the phone, I should have some free time this afternoon. 500k liquid is plenty enough to get started but don't sell your stocks just yet.

Ask for a comparison based on the current coverage and also any recommendations for better coverage. 

Without having MLS access it's more difficult, but can be done :) I would not go in with numbers based solely on hopeful STR analytics.

Then negotiate based on that.

I do my fair share of phone calls and networking but every year I have manage to come across a deal so large my brain starts to fume. 

She came back, with her broker on the phone, stating I was being discriminatory, which I wasn't. 

Smaller industrial properties have maintainedimpressive occupancy rates and rising rents for several years, and in recentmonths they have increasingly stood out as one of the best-performingcategories of commercial real estate.To learn which U.S. markets have the most acuteshortages of smaller industrial space, CoStar ranked the 60 largest U.S.markets based on the composite scores of three criteria: current availabilityrates for industrial buildings smaller than 50,000 square feet; the mediannumber of months on the market of 10,000-25,000-square-foot industrial spacesleased in the past 12 months; and the median number of months on the market ofindustrial spaces smaller than 10,000 square feet leased in the past 12 months.

Basically, information received by their agents via a landline phone or fax, from a sister office or friend.