Our mortgage for 30 yr including HOA 460 a month.If we sell now with 6% commission, we would probably have to sell at 489k to break even (and lose the money we pay monthly).Either way, My brother will most likely stay in dc area for a long time and just rent somewhere cheaper and I will do the same and then move to Jacksonville when the time comes.Question is: should we sell now or should we rent it out for a year?

If you don't close there is a big chance you will lose your EM.

You found a great site and hat goal could be done easily in my opinion.

That is the one point I would make, if the thermostat is not easily accessible it is a pain.

I lose a lot of those, but did get 3 last year.

Could easily be labeled as one.

Finding comps isn't necessarily hard, but you begin to get vastly different numbers for houses that are pretty similar.Given that I am new to this and want to minimize my risk exposure on my first rehab deal, my first intuition is to just focus my search in the zip codes I can easily comp out and I know will limit my risk of basing my decision on bad data.

At 809k you lose in every way.

I live alone and can very easily get by with a mini fridge, Crockpot, and microwave, so I don't expect the basement will have a "kitchen," per se.

Great list - one thing you might want to consider adding is comping propertiesA lot of us use excel spreadsheets that VAs can easily use to fill out for each property (listing all pertinent info from how many beds/bath to what was recently sold in the area)Another one would be managing craigslist postings (tracking posts/responses or putting up new posts)