STR vs. Long Term Rental for First Real Estate Investment?

[Trevor Matern]

My wife and I have finally saved up enough to start to look into real estate investing and we are debating between an STR in a destination market (think Breckenridge, Tahoe, etc. - likely one 2BR/2BA or 3BR/2BA unit) or longer term rentals in a growing market (think suburbs of Austin, Nashville, etc. - likely two 3BR/2BA units).

Both would be managed remotely, though we have a lot of family in the potential STR market (retired parent who could help) and we could use the STR unit ourselves for 1-2 weeks per year. Long term rental would require a property management company (we live in a HCOL area that we can't buy in).

Ultimate goal of the STR market would be breakeven cashflow with unit appreciation (since we would be using it for vacation as well) vs. long term rental requiring cash flow + long term appreciation.

We would love any advice or learnings from others who made similar decisions when starting out.