Just as you said Arsen, that meant a higher mortgage payment, and when rent rates dropped I was not payment $3,500 out of pocket every month to cover the difference between mortgage payment and rental payments.  

Start by learning about different strategies, market trends, financing options, and best practices.

Are there any different routes we should be looking at?

All of the tenants that we rented to Section 8 got partial rent assistance and had to make up the difference themselves and we never had a tenant get 100% of rent from Section 8. 

Multifamily "commercial" is going to be different than office, industrial, retail, hotel.  

I wonder if it’s better to go with a different realtor?

There’s a big difference between a 5 minute and 10 minute walk to the beach.

This is a big difference from other markets that surprises people when we tell them this (especially coming from CA). 

I took an excel sheet I found online (from "Tactica") and tweaked it a bit to help track and compare different major cities/ different local cities by taking its population growth, labor stats, and rental stats/ multifamily stock to help someone visualize the different places and see where their next investment could be.

I am not very knowledgable on the different loan options.