The advantage was as long as we paid it back in full the withdrawal was not taxed as income and no penalty fee.

It sounds to me that most if not all would take advantage of a great market and sell now. 

@Lake Ingle I do it all the time and it definitely gives you an advantage.

Schedule flexibility in your main profession is one of the biggest advantages one can have when getting into real estate.

You want to have enough profit to take advantage of the MOST IMPORTANT benefit of real estate which is depreciation. 

it means when the boss isn't in the store, all the employees slack off and take advantage. it applies 100% here. if you never go visit the house, how do you know it's even still there?

Possibly moving to one of the units in order to take advantage of lower down payment option. basically if there is an option to pay a lower interest I'd like to take advantage of it but I never done that before I'm trying to learn how to do it without getting screwed.

When you factor in the lack of risk with cash-only, it's probably more advantageous.

It gave the advantage of locking down a tenant so you didn't have the worry about having to regularly re-rent the property should the tenant give notice.

Long-term, buy & hold is a great strategy - I've always been a firm believer that you have the upper hand with these properties in the investment field because you have the advantage of being first in an area then being able to wait for appreciation for whenever you want to sell "when the time is right".Often times, these rental properties also don't involve the full scale upgrades (less money out-right) that you would need in a traditional fix-&-flip in order to hit projected ARV's.The one draw-back here is out-sourcing your rentals to a property management company - which finding the right one for the right price can take some time to vet - or else managing the property yourself, in which case you will need to start building relationships with contractors to ensure proper repairs are being done and the needs of your tenants are being met.You can do buy & holds out of state easily, too, just find the right market that is land-lord friendly (for example, mid-west: Indiana), and I think its fair to say you could do well long-term with the right properties!