.), easily get cold feet, battle financing issues or sometimes just ghost you at closing.Selling a home to a tenant is probably the better path (lease option), but you really have to work with them every month and coach them to get them ready to buy the home, otherwise, 70% will not execute. 

Are you allowed to lease the unit?

Some will want to see it, but we have leased our unit twice without showing the property.

Over the next 3 - 5 years I plan to 1031 exchange all of our single family homes and purchase another 40 that won’t have mortgages (we use the lease option model to sell our properties to maximize profits so we cycle through properties every 3-5 years).

I only want to buy and hold, recoup my initial investment, and only then maybe lease to own if it's too much of a headache to continue managing them etc. 

I would lease it to cover cost for 2/3 years and then I would sell once I could get $475,000+  Would be a nice ROI and is actually doable.Love this idea!

If I’m setting up leases I assume I need this license.

But we also added lease options to our model which attracted a better tenant and lessened the the amount of work that it took to manage the lease option properties.So I would encourage you consider investing in your own back yard before going out of state, especially if you live in North Carolina. 

Signs of this are poor lease quality, maybe M2M tenants, high expenses (unnecessary things like high trash bills, internet, cleaning, security).

A local lawyer approved lease worked for the tenants I chose; I took in rents on Apartments.com.