It didn't work out so well but I understand certain aspects are out of their control. 

I am in Austin and Texas markets are shifting to buyers/renters so tailoring your search would be good.

People ask me all the time what I did at the beginning to be so successful and while I rattle off the usual stuff (reinvested all my money back into the business, delayed gratification, etc), it's really occurred to me again that before I bought a single house I thought about who I wanted to have as tenants, and tailored my purchases to that demographic.

@Lenn Lin, I'm not a CPA, an not qualified to comment on the accounting aspect of this arrangement.

One aspect that you bring into this discussion is time.

Hopefully, the other aspects of real estate investing will present opportunities on the horizon.

Look at every aspect of the house for things that could become issues.

This lets you tailor your approach.

We've got a group of students in one, a young couple who just moved to the area and doesn't want to buy yet in another, and a professional in the third who's opening up a new branch of his company here.I think proximity to the cool stuff of a city is almost more important than trying to tailor your location to a specific group.

Besides this, rather boring, pastime of writing code, I also happen to be extremely passionate about real estate, more specifically multifamily and I decided to launch a new project to develop an MVP of software solution that is tailored to the needs of property managers.