Then ride the appreciation train to give you equity to pull out and invest with cash elsewhere. 

If you have a PM, they run it, it kick off some cash, it’s paid off, etc. then I’d just let it ride.

It is far away from us -- a 2.5 hour plane ride then three hour drive. 

Just give the notice and ride it out.

To start I am targeting SFH morphing into buy and hold in 12 months.

That's still a good chunk, but kind of a hairy ride for a bit waiting for appreciation.Now if you bought those  3 years ago when I started buying out of state for cash flow you could have paid $750 to 800K and made 125K to $175K appreciation, but you still would have run a small negative cash flow over 3 years probably say  about 20 to 25k for the 3 years.So all in all in the hottest appreciation market in the last 3 years you'd make a net of $150K or so with that California real estate putting down about $250K down payment.In my case the last 3 years with my out of state property I got from $250K  a total of  $135K of forced appreciation and  rental income of 105k. 

My advice to him, that I am preparing to provide, is Ride the lease out and when the lease expires we will renew in his name alone.  

For your first time, you may not be able to ride for 20 miles or do hill climbs, but you work towards it and you improve slowly.

Cops ride the bus every weekend evening handing out $50 tickets for barfing and arresting underage drinkers - still drinking!

There's an old saying among motorcycle riders that goes like this: "Dress for the fall, not the ride."