I won't be living in NW Arkansas at least until I get out of the military so if I buy a house there, it would likely be a rental property.
I would think long and hard about this wrinkle in your plan. Rental properties don't manage themselves, and finding a fee-based property manager worth a sh*t is hit and miss, at best. By the time you realize you struck a
"miss" it will be too late.
What will you do if your property manager just walks away from the deal after the first hiccup? It happened to me, and they left me high and dry. Turns out the contract doesn't really obligate them to do much of anything other than
try to rent your place out and collect the fee you are obligated to pay for as long as they choose to remain engaged.
What if you have to do an eviction? Place a new tenant while remaining in compliance with Federal and State fair housing laws? Comply with local rent control or other regulations?
How will you manage repairs? Neighbor complaints? You name it. Anything can happen, and if you're not in the area, the problems--whatever they might be--won't just go away. They typically just get worse if left unattended over time. Think leaky roof, busted water pipe, delinquent tenant, etc.
When my last house was first built, the crew unknowingly drove a nail into a water pipe during construction. The nail plugged the hole, so no one knew about it. It took 30 years for that nail to rust away and for the pipe to spring a leak that pretty much sunk my downstairs bathroom into the ground. It had to be completely gutted and rebuilt, starting at the frame, after the leak was fixed.
Managing those problems remotely can be tricky, at best, doubly tricky if the property is vacant when the problems arise, and certainly more expensive to deal with than if you are local. Just granting access to repair people becomes a non-trivial problem if you are not there to unlock the front door for them. Inspecting their work, afterwards, to make sure they actually did what you needed them to do, is equally challenging from afar.
And, of course, in the worst scenarios, your property is only generating unexpected expenses and no income. So there's that, too.
Personally, even if I intended to manage rental properties after a military career, I certainly wouldn't venture into that space for the first time if I were living outside of the area. It's not at all a
passive investment.In my experience, property managers are sales people first. They will tell you anything to get you signed on. But they are only
actual property managers for as long as nothing of any consequence goes wrong. Then they simply return your keys and walk away when you need them most. If you don't have a viable backup plan for dealing with all possible contingencies yourself, I wouldn't even contemplate doing this while you are in the service.
And unless it's truly a passion of yours, a 2nd career that you really want to actively pursue, I wouldn't do it after your service, either.
