Best places to spend your budget IMO, though, to get that good tenant that will stay a few years - bite the bullet and upgrade from oil or electric heat to gas heat if your HVAC already needs replacing.  

Locale with population growth and preferably no one job sector making up the lionshare of labor (I’m from Alaska and it’s dominated by the oil industry which ain’t great at the moment)My long term plan is to buy 2 per year and scale that up over 5–8 years for an early retirement (I make fairly good money to buy and once I know what I’m doing think with the refinance can buy a lot more than 2 per year).So where are good areas to look at doing this?

. #1 Market in the US for Job CreationContrary to what the majority of out of state investors believe, Houston not only have Oil & Gas (Energy), Houston has other job growth in Consulting, Information Technology, Aerospace and aviation, Medical treatment and Research, Goods Distribution, and Manufacturing.

At the end of the day, it's a city that lives and dies with oil and gas. 

My best performer so far is marathon oil.

My brakes were in need of a change and I had my oil done at the dealership.

Make sure the deals are cash flowing, a lot of syndicators are currently trying to sell you snake oil with no yield. 

After reading many of the posts by broker/agents my takeaway is that honest, experienced, knowledgeable and competent agents are tired of the inexperienced, part time, or fly by night agents (fly by night: someone who enters as a salesperson for whatever is “hot” at the moment, be it real estate, oil and gas leases, used cars, etc) muddying the waters and causing them twice the work to close a transaction.  

Have you thought about investing in gas and oil with about a 9 to 10 % roi.. its a 1031 exchange alternative of like kind. 

Talking 30-100 SFR property range pool with that being a portion of their investment portfolio(so not including ag, oil, timber investments, etc.).