If you only have $10,000 in equity, and it rents at $1,925/month, I'm willing to make a guess that you don't have a choice...your closing costs on the sale are going to eat up that equity and you may have to pay to get out of it.Your mortgage is at a good rate, but that's a tough position to be in.

We have been pushing for more licensing to remove the one time realtor / managers from screwing up our industry and profession of choice.  

This is a lifestyle choice - do you want to continue managing an asset or want something closer to "mailbox money"?  

Is everyone else making bad investment choices or am I just being too conservative?

Just so you know - you can leave/switch brokerages pretty easily so don't worry if you make a choice and then decided to go a different route too.

If after analyzing many different properties in your area you find that it is hard to reach your goal, you have several choices.1.  

It'd help to look up the demographics of the target area and combine that information with the types of homes being sold and use all of that information to make your choice. 2.

But there are not many good choices in this seller market, either buying REO required a lot of work, or investing out-of-state.

I personally haven't attempted to find an alternative.  

In our experience (only 2 units, but over ten years) the worst of the worst tenants are those that made the choice to damage housing or not pay for housing when times got tough.