Sell Quick or Rent, Please help!
I would really appreciate if someone can give me advice. I am planning on investing in a home within the next couple of months, however, I don't know if I should buy and then sell immediately or I should rent out the home for a couple of years and then sell. Please help me out if you can. 
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Seems to me like there is a simple answer...
...it all depends! Seriously though, what type of property (a rehab candidate, foreclosure, direct purchase/good shape). Is this a single family home, multi-unit property or commercial real estate? Do you think there will be a good spread between its remarketing value and what you can acquire it for? Do you need the money now to build equity in your real estate business for the next deal or are you looking for long term cash flow/appreciation? All these questions would affect your decision.
If you don't need the money -- or there isn't a decent spread between the remarketing value and your costs to acquire it, and the property is in an area that has a history of appreciation without obvious signs of reversing that trend -- you generally can't go wrong in hanging onto the property if you like the landlording business. If you want to build a base of equity to use in your investing business and the property has some profit in it immediately or after the rehab work is complete -- flip it.
Or if don't have a strong preference coming out of the survey above, you can take the easy route and advertise it both ways to see which one comes first...
...just recognize that a quick rental to a bad tenant is not the best way to make money. Do your background work.
Thank you so much for your help. I do not have a particular house just yet. I am currently doing comps on a couple of houses.
From your advice, I gather that I should flip my first house, but only if it has a large amount of equity. I appreciate your patients with my silly questions, but I need to ask you one more if you don't mind. I want to know the best way to see if the homeowner has any tax liens on the house.
Tax liens should be relatively easy to find (depending on the particular county in which you live). You need to either do a search for the County Recorder's web-site (if they have an online search/index) or you will need to go down to the County Recorder's offices to perform the search. The County is the one in which your property is located, not the one in which you live. The Recorder will have Deeds, Mortgages, Liens and most other documents recorded against a property. One disclaimer -- there may be some states that don't have separate Recorders/Auditors/Appraisers/etc for each county. You will just need to find out the particulars for your state. Good luck.
Some other valuable web-sites to look up are the following:
County Appraiser or County Auditor - will provide data on properties by address and/or owner name including their current tax appraised value (generally a bit lower than market value).
County Clerk of Courts - will provide data on court cases filed against a property owner. You can determine if a property is in foreclosure, has liens or judgements in process against them, etc.
County Sheriff - depending on the state, will have information on foreclosures and tax sales.