I am excited to be at the stage I am at where I feel ready to start trying to put in offers on small multi-family housing units to generate capital and long-term wealth!  

(All sounds good in theory right?)

If you're in a very competitive market you may want to get the house staged (filled with furniture) for marketing purposes.If you must list it in such a way as to disclose the address (for example you list it with an agent as a rental) please spend the extra $15-20 bucks to install a simplisafe alarm system: this is an inexpensive alarm system that works over 3G cellular networks.

The time horizon sounds long but is actually short. 

Sounds like the issue is your debt to income ratio.

If you are thousands of miles away that sounds like a disaster.  

If possible, it sounds like your best bet would be to invest in a quadplex (4 units) to house hack.

Sounds like you have some favorable impressions from both a flip and buy and hold?

Since the business has only been his for 3 years, he keeps telling me that he's killing himself to maintain the business for nothing, since he'll end up with nothing anyway.None of this sounds right to me, but I haven't lived in NJ for 30 years.  

Of course, almost all of that could be mitigated by getting a local investor friendly agent which sounds like the most logical choice to make this early in the game.