It might also be unavoidable to live in a high cost of living area due to my career choices. 

Credit scores are a reflection of someone's ability to learning and understanding the rules of the game and haveing the discipline to play by them.If you already have good credit, already pay everything on time (autopay), then increaseing your limits will probably help you the most, because it gets your utilization down, ideally under 10%.Higher hanging fruits are average credit and account age (just have to wait for that I guess) and inquiries, which are sometimes unavoidable as real estate investors.  

We have had some repair issues that were unavoidable unless we had sold, but a small price to pay in the long run! 

Any delay or failure in the performance by Landlord hereunder shall be excused if and to the extent caused by the occurrence of any event that is beyond Landlord's control, such as fires/ floods, earthquakes, wars, sabotage, terrorism, vandalism, governmental acts, injunctions, or labor strikes, acts of God and any other occurrences that are unavoidable or unpreventable despite reasonable efforts to prevent, avoid, delay, or mitigate the effects thereof."

Is that unavoidable in the beginning? 

Obviously, stuff happens and sometimes it's unavoidable but maybe consider implementing something into your approval process where you require to have some type of phone or in-person conversation with someone before moving forward with approval. 

And I'm just waiting for all the regulations to start because I believe it's going to be unavoidable. 

Yes, Don, of course taxes are taxes, and they are as unavoidable as death and dumb real estate policy decisions by our local socialist-leaning government. 

This is an unavoidable inherent risk of all domestic plans.

You make an great point, to keep stashing cash aside to prepare for the unavoidable "unexpected" costs of physical REI.