What gets me the most gain? Larger DP or lower interest rate?

[Allen Lopez]

So I am buying my primary residential home. Purchase price is $251,900. Due to my job, I may relocate often. So far I am thinking that I will relocate anywhere between 3-5 years. I will like to keep this as an investment property with rent being $1700/month.

If I give 10%DP with a conventional loan, interest rate of 4.375, my monthly payments will be around $1400. If give a 20% DP, my interest rate barely goes down, but my monthly payments will be $1300.

This got me thinking, what’s better in the long run? To give a larger DP or to buy points to get the interest rate down to 3.5% (I think it will cost about $10k).

So my question is

For an investor what is more beneficial in the long term?

I would think we would want whatever gets us the lowest monthly payments.