Ideally, you would have three physical bank accounts:  a cash account which holds the bulk of your money, an operating account which your checks are written from and bills are paid, and a deposit accounting to keep tenants deposits separate from your money.  

Unless you've lived in one of those markets before and really know it well, you're not gaining any advantage by investing where friends and family live - you'll be hiring a PM that knows the area, and you shouldn't have to check in on the prop physically with any frequency unless you just want to.

Feel free to copy this sheet to your own personal Google drive and edit the themes as you see fit. 

Each State may have different requirements on deposits into accounts bearing interest, so be sure to verify.Use your accounting system to track rents due vs rents paiddeposits paid vs deposits heldWith Quickbooks, use the CLASS feature to track physical property and your reports will nicely snapshot your tenants

Our search has been ongoing for about 6 months at this point and we've scoured the market and landed on two properties that fit our model.

The property doesn't fit our acquisition criteria, but we were considering the idea of wholesaling it to an organization that specializes in providing housing for recovering addicts or something similar.  

and if you physically fly out to the location, at what point do you fly out - to look at homes?

@Evan, hey I think Jerry has the suggestion most fitting for you. you live in a huge college area, you should try focus on that with student rentals. don't rent the unit out as a whole, lease it out room to room.

I did the online video option. it splits the difference between your price points, but it fit what I needed schedule wise.

The calculator can measure an investment for you, but it’s up to you to interpret those measurements to see if they fit your investing strategy.