These little communities are almost self sustaining with multiple eating and shopping establishments.

The money costs will eat up your equity in a hurry.

You should eat the fee.

And then reno, you can do everything else right just to have contractor profit margins eat all the equitable gains, this is where it strongly enforces that a person needs to have a very good mastery of renovation and optimally is a contractor themselves or has a GC partner. 

Be careful that you don’t spend too much on the buy end in this hot market, because if and when the market turns down, you want your investments to feed you, not eat you alive! 

We are a couple - enjoy nature, going out to eat/drink maybe once or twice a month.As of now, I plan to do a 30 year FHA owner occupied - after 1 year I will move out so all units will be rented out and I should be cashflow positive around $500 or so.

Other things to take into consideration are that PM companies will generally charge a leasing fee of 1/2 to 1 months rent and often charge some type of releasing fee annually as well which really eats away at profits. 

I feel like the common theme is “take advantage now.”My thought though as I was eating a bowl of Captain Crunch this morning was...If I bought another property today with plans to sell in the future.

You’d have to decide for yourself if you want to manage the property remotely yourself (totally doable, but a bit more work) and make a higher return OR if you want to outsource the management altogether to a 3rd party and not have that hassle (you’d typically pay as much as 25%, which would likely eat up most of the profit). - Lastly, as far as the actual property goes, what I usually recommend is to setup an alert on Zillow or Redfin for the type of property you’re looking for and just monitor new listings as they come in.

And that can definitely eat into your year-long returns on a rental property.