Wife and I manage 3 units ourselves. She's the numbers guru and deals with getting the tenants and setting rents. I will tell you, buying right now in Austin for a rental is a huge PITA. You can get 5% on T-Bills, or make 3-4% ROI on renting a unit you purchase OUTRIGHT. If you mortgage it, you're lucky to break even right now in the market.
That said, we've had better luck not using a management company, rather doing it mom-and-pop style. We use Zillow to post our rentals, which will propagate out to several other sites without having to post to MLS, and do our due diligence on the applicants (background checks through 3rd party websites, a little google stalking, etc.) I'm very hands-on with the maintenance, and tend to solve most issues without calling in pros to fix (HVAC, plumbing, most basic maintenance issues, etc.) $75 / month doesn't seem like much, but that's nearly a grand a year going to another company. My time and mileage can be deducted from taxes, making it worth it in the end.
On the tenant side, we've been mostly lucky. Had two bad tenants in the past. One was a single mom who trashed the house on the way out. Her son punched at least 10 holes in the walls of the house, was smoking weed on the roof in the back and disposing of his joints in the gutters before his mom could see. He even managed to spray paint our private property that was stored on site which pissed me off to no end. The other one has had some financial issues but really works to get the rent paid, but had to move out early. She's left the unit pretty trashed so far (although she's not 100% out), and is likely going to cost us during the turn-around.
My biggest recommendation going forward is to plan for 1-2 months a year for the property to sit vacant (move-out, turn-around, new tenant). If you can afford the 2 months out of commission, and can do a lot of the maintenance yourself, it's a good investment. And always plan for the county to screw you hard every year on tax increases, because you have no homestead to cover your ass. I'm hoping the years of 20% valuation increases are a thing of the past, but we bought our last property and were making well over the 1% rule, but with rents stagnant and property values still climbing, we're at a 2/3% rent to home value currently.