Our first rental, prime vacation territory

[Rogue Entity]

Hi BiggerPockets Community! I'm excited to be here. I'm a family man and looking to start earning more passive income for my family while also doing my day job, which I enjoy and just got a considerable promotion in.

I'm a federal employee working in logistics. We moved to a vacation town where there was an open position and we bought a house at around our maximum purchasing power. I always considered this my biggest financial mistake, but I'm at a point where it now presents an opportunity.

I just received a significant promotion in another state and I'll be making more than double what I've been making here the past few years. Just under $110k. My current property was bought with a zero down VA loan for $210k and my second property is pretty much identical, with the same loan situation. Our current home was bought at a %2.99 mortgage.

A week before moving I realized that I can't justify simply selling this house in prime vacation territory for barely a profit without at least attempting to turn it into a profitable investment over the long term. I've put about 5k of improvements into the house in the past week, calling contractors left and right and getting set up with a property manager. All a bit of a rush job. The mortgage is $1,100 per month but we've been paying $1,200 for the past 2 years. Rentals in my area fill pretty quickly, and there's no other rentals currently on the market. If, hypothetically, I put up my property today then I would become the only available rental in the area (seriously, no apartments, no condos, no homes, nothing else currently available) I might have a corporate client interested that rents out houses for their employees. Have I gotten lucky and found a gem for my first rental or am I taking on too much risk? We're admittedly low on usable cash right now because we need to pay up closing costs for our new home in about a week, and for the first time in my life I've been actively using a credit card in order to hold onto cash.

I feel the cash flow from my promotion will allow me to pay off the debt within a reasonable amount of time once our moving costs are settled (relocation is being reimbursed) so I've committed to trying to make this work. I figure worst case scenario, we sell for above market since we've made these recent improvements (new carpet, paint, water heater, repairs furnace, landscaping, deck repair). My estimates after considering expenses and my desired rental price ($2k monthly) puts my profit on this place at about $550 per month.

Happy to hear anyone's feedback or takes on the situation. I'm up at 3AM right now working on painting the new walls, so I welcome any quick distractions