More importantly, if you have a suggestion on how you would handle a similar situation please let me know so I can see this from some different perspectives.

California is a first come first served state from a fair housing perspective. 

Time you don’t get back and if you look at it purely from a business perspective, it’s a drain.

This makes things easier from not only a personal liability perspective, yet also from a business liability and investment standpoint as well. 

I look at it from the perspective of - do you have more time or more money?

The most common way I have seen (and only way, frankly, in my LP investments) is: from a tax perspective every dollar sent to investors is considered a distribution, and thereby reduces taxable basis and defers taxes owed on those distributions.Internally, the sponsors classify every dollar paid up to the pref rate as a return ON capital, so as not to reduce the capital balance and pref owed.  

I've googled and viewed various property management companies; however, the reviews are largely from the perspective of the renter, which is great and all, but not very helpful in understanding the buyers experience as it pertains to analysis, remote buying, remodeling and lease up.

That puts things into perspective. 8k-10k per mailout, doesnt that end up being very costly?

E.g. iLevel (if running a fund), or the Yardi / ResMan platform (not very nice from an IR perspective, also minimal data analytics)The above are just a few of the items you will need (and might be already using). 

From a 1031 perspective any QI with a national footprint can help you out.