Perhaps, you have a recommendation on a local (Houston) real estate agent that can help me locate tenants/roommate? 

Yes, injecting a lot of out-of-state/foreign capital is great and certainly will help boost the economy.

Toward the end of the year, we started seeing a big uptick in down payment assistance loan failures (2nd position loans under $10k to help with down payments that were in default.

Similar with a SFH: I can at least get in the market with a 5% conventional loan not expecting cash flow but hoping appreciation will help me out in the next 2+ years and I will at least be able to put up the remainder of the expenses since I do live with my parents. 

I hope this helps and others will add more.

Most of the changes will be cosmetic and one needs a more work, so I want to pull about 150 from one of the houses.

Thanks in advance for any help!

So this post is to be mainly geared toward to help set expectations for out-of-state investors, and I'm hoping for some solid contributions from people who are actively (or recently) involved in successful acquisition/disposition of smaller MF in the Charlotte MSA (broker, owner, lender.. etc). 

Over the past two months, I've had the pleasure of helping four buyers secure fantastic investments.

DSCR loans are based off of down payment, credit score and either actual or market rents so it helps to supercharge an investor's real estate goals and net worth.