Also, one large benefit I like is the fact that the home is preserved pretty well, because tenants aren't moving their stuff in and out.

By paying off the rental, I can reclaim my VA loan benefit in order to use it to buy a house-hack property when my family moves again (in June of 2022) for very little money down.2.)

In my opinion, investing anywhere in SoCal needs to be thought of as a long term investment for appreciation, tax benefits and loan pay-down.

Rocket mortgage agent saying we can start the process now and they will move very slowly to get the benefits of interest rate towards lower side at the time of closing as we started now with them.

After two years, you can usually just do an appraisal to prove the equity, and keep your loan and rate.You would just want to weigh the cost/benefit with the rate change to decide if it's worth doing.

This new property that I’m interested in buying would technically be my new primary residence but I don’t plan on staying there all to often in the traditional sense since I cannot live in the same city that I work in to receive tax benefits on my salary.

You get the tax benefits of owning it through the interest (that someone else is paying) and the depreciation.

So it makes sense to take the depreciation.You may want to seek the advice of a chartered accountant in Canada and a CPA in the US to make sure you are taking advantage of all of the benefits available to you.

So that could be a benefit to the seller.If the seller is wanting to do another 1031 then they will have to do some specific things to accomplish both the 1031 and owner carry.The note, as a proceed of the sale has to go into their 1031 exchange account. 

That’s not even counting rental increases over time, mortgage principal paydown, and tax benefits.