Purchased new home (primary residence): What to do with my old home

[Ivan Meraz]

I'm new to real estate investing and I have a situation that I need help with.  I just bought a new house for me and my family but I didn't sell our old home.  I do still have a mortgage on it but I didn't have to sell it to buy our new home so I figured I could use that as my first rental/investment property.  My plan was to rent the house and also pull the equity and invest in another property.  I owe about 100k on the house and current value is about $250k.  With the current mortgage payment I would have positive cash flow renting it.   However, refinancing and pulling the equity wouldn't make sense because of the current interest rates.  The rate on the current mortgage is 4.375 and I'd be looking at between 6 and 7 if I refinanced.  Although I would love to keep it as a rental I would also like to be able to use the equity for investing in other properties but the with the current rates it seems to me that refinancing that property is a bad idea.  So the question is do I 1. sell it and invest the gains in other properties, 2. keep it and rent it and wait for rates to come down to pull the equity, or 3.  go ahead and refinance and use the equity to invest?  All opinions and advice is welcome.

Thanks,

Ivan