I am totally willing to look outside Portland proper, and might actually prefer something outside the city because it seems the regulations are a little more lenient outside of Multnomah county.

At the end of the day, though, the best investment strategy is dependent on your own preferences/goals/skills and will be a personal decision.

I prefer only cash deals (personal savings for investments) only. 

Since I live in Indianapolis, IN, I would prefer some one here in Indy.Thank you.

The hardest part is the inconvenience to your current residents.I prefer to sell my rent properties to my residents. 

We would prefer to keep the renovation budget to around $30K-$40K total.

We are looking into East Austin to purchase a house - preferably a duplex (or larger) that we can house hack or a home w/ an ADU built in it, that we can also house-hack.

I started this project hoping i could efficiently review the most amount of properties in order to maximize the potential investment options to bid at auction....this is what I have so far.First thing i did was to create the listings, I matched the properties been auctioned with their corresponding pics and the property specs (rooms, size, floors etc.).Second, for each property I automated the data collection process from public records and created a report with: Foreclosure info, owner info, taxes data, liens including mortgages , satisfaction of mortgages,  assigments, violations and permits and court dockets.This data is updated daily to capture new filings (specially the dockets to capture bk and motions to cancel sales)Now that i have the data i can apply my personal "preferences" to go through the report and in a few minutes discard  properties that have certain attributes I "dislike". 

You need to either tell us what state you are in or research the laws yourself (preferred).Generally, you can do whatever you want when the current lease ends.

@Anne NguyenListsource can work well but I prefer PropStream as well.