Now if you are using your own personal agent, then I am glad you provided them the education and hopefully with your guidance y'all can find properties suitable for your investment portfolio.

I need to focus on finding a suitable location to begin with. 

You can't do anything with the property if you don't own it so you are risking your 10% down hoping the VA finds it suitable. 

What type of investing strategy is more suitable for this region?

I have my rentals linked from my custom website which I'm trying to attract visitors with content like blog posts.  

You cannot pay yourself a salary from your plan (this is a prohibited transaction) and retirement accounts are not suitable for creating an income for you in the short term.

(seeing as his damage is the direct cause of the apartment not being suitable for rent in April)Sorry if these are dumb questions, I'm just not sure what to do.I cannot do the work myself as usual, I am pending surgery for my right arm, and it is currently very limited in use.Therefore I am needing to hire people to do it for me.

I think the most important thing we can do is use that money to find a suitable multi family unit to live in as a primary residence so we can both start off with 1 property each.

I don't know how hard or easy it is to find a suitable tenant for this specific property.

Perhaps there is a way to work on the behavior (supervise dogs when outside, etc) and task the tenant with some responsibility for this, to manage it in short.As is, I think your only suitable tenant is someone with (yes, I know) dogs, even larger dogs or someone also working on some behavior issues with a younger or adopted dog (who basically can't find a dog friendly unit).