I know $200/unit is ideal but what I've been seeing is much lower,  which is what confused me. 

I deal with it too- try it on 10+ houses.

Same with hot water.It really depends on how the place is setup, but the ideal setup is to have a completely separate furnace and water heater for each unit, even if it means going all electric.

Without ideal credit, maybe sell them on your energy and interest, along with the building essentially paying the mortgage via rents.

., does selling and shifting to your ideal property outperform the condo?

Not an ideal market, and not a lot of growth.I'd prefer to be a short flight or not to long drive away from the properties we purchase.  

Most of the landlords that I run across on BP run their properties in a similar fashion to a professionally managed property, but I deal with landlords all of the time that are constantly dealing with headaches and liabilities that could have been avoided if they had the proper systems in place.As far as dependency on a PM...

It is not ideal the way this went down, but most likely the tenant didn't know their name would come up for the voucher, so I doubt they were intentionally deceiving you. 

Ideally I would love to find a job doing anything RE.

I work until 6:00pm so a meeting time of 6:30 would be ideal.