This crazy situation will let us have multiple FHA loans, should I do it?

[Michael Mroczka]

Hey friends!

Long time lurker, even though I post infrequently. My wife and I own a cashflowing quad-plex in Chicago that was a 3.5% FHA loan. We are in a fairly unique position because I work fully remote in a very secure/high-paying job and my wife is about to start her career as an Audiologist which also will be secure/high-paying. She has to do residency in St. Louis for a year and then residency again in some other state for another year. We are considering buying in the St. Louis market at the moment with a 3.5% down loan because it's just so cheap. Something that many people don't realize about FHA loans is that you actually can have more than one under a few special circumstances (https://fhalenders.com/fha-100...). One of those circumstances is moving for job related reasons more than 100 miles away from your current FHA loan. My wife and I will be doing this once a year for the next 2-3 years at least so there is potential to get an FHA loan with every move.

With that said, we've been looking in St. Louis for about a month for a house hack and there isn't really a ton of multi-family inventory so we were considering just buying a single family home and getting the nicest home in the nicest area we can (we have great credit/reserves so we can buy something really nice). We'd love to try long-distance mid-term renting it, since we are confident in our abilities to self-manage and build a team in the area. If we live in the house for a year, we can rent it out but as a long-term rental any house will almost certainly not cashflow since rent hasn't caught up to the rising price of homes in St. Louis. As a midterm rental, it can potentially cashflow. Here's the question.

Should we buy a place that does not work for LTR cashflow just because we can use an FHA loan and can comfortably afford the negative cashflow in our budget? I feel like it's a waste of a year to go there and rent when we can own a $400,000 house with just a $14,000 downpayment + 12 months rent + ~$150/month to offset the negative cashflow (if we have to LTR because MTR'ing doesn't work out). As a long term buy-and-hold, I feel like it's pretty hard not to win here even if we are negative for a while because rent rates will almost certainly rise over time.

What would you do if you were me? Thanks! :)