Newbie San Diego, CA selling vs renting

[Bob P.]

Hello all,

I am currently in San Diego, CA and started reading and learning about real estate investing over the last few years. I've also read and learned a lot on this site and its great resource for information. Anyways, we took the jump to try to get into real estate and bought our place here last year in hopes of staying here a few more years before moving duty stations and then renting out our property. Unfortunately I was injured pretty badly and was medically retired from the military recently. We are moving to another state pretty far away where my wife has already gotten a contract to work starting this summer. Since things happened unexpectedly and sooner than we planned for, we are trying to figure out what to do with our place here in Imperial Beach. After looking at the market we are moving to we want to buy because of how quickly the prices are rising (20%) over 1 year and want to get a place before it gets to unaffordable. I've been talking with some loan officers and we will not be able to get a loan without either first selling the house or having a lease agreement. The market here is pretty good and they are finishing up building the new naval base here that will be starting to transition personnel over the next 2 years. However because we just bought the house less than a year ago and used the VA loan we didn't have to put a down payment. So, if we did rent we would be in the red at least for the first few years. And the VA loans is tied up in the house obviously. Selling it would not be a problem and most of the houses in this are are off the market within a week. However, we would most likely break even or owe some after closing but it would also free up the VA loan again. I guess I am just looking for suggestions that we should either sell and start over or hold on and rent and then decide to sell later when we have more equity.

Any help/feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob