Renting while owning?

[Jon S.]

Short back story:  My wife and I sold our primary a few months ago and are currently renting.  We live in Los Angeles and are interested in buy and hold strategy with multi-family properties.

My question is do you think it's a bad idea to do buy and hold while we ourselves are renting elsewhere? Naturally one might say to live in one unit of the investment property. However the areas we are considering for the investment aren't areas we'd like to live in. I guess my hesitation is due the fact that it seems counterintuitive to invest in buy and hold while we ourselves are paying rent to another landlord. Now we don't plan on renting forever obviously but with our current capital we can either choose to start REI now and buy our primary later, or vice versa.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.