Wondering about keeping primary residence for rental property

[Luke Angstadt]

Hey everyone. I’m in the very beginning stage of my real estate journey and was wondering about getting started by keeping my current primary residence as a rental instead of selling. My family and I are looking to move soon (within the next year or two) and was wondering if I did keep it, how would that effect us with a purchase of a new home through the lenders eyes. How do they look at balancing two mortgages, ect??? Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

[Jim K.]

@Luke Angstadt

@Thomas S. make a very good point here. It is very common for newbies to want to do this to get a start as landlords -- hold on to their starter home as an investment and rent it out while moving to a (usually nicer) second home. The biggest problem is that you and your wife will maintain an emotional connection to the first home, which is usually not at all set up as a rental, and when you see the not-so-nice things that tenants will do to it, it will affect you. Granted, this can be a learning experience about how to harden rentals properly, but it often creates all kinds of nostalgic sentiments that can flare up into conflicts with the tenants.

The usual scenario is that the tenants move in, live as tenants do, and the newbie landlords go back in and find delicate stuff, or meaningful stuff, or stuff that they didn't even know was meaningful to them damaged or painted over or disrespected in some way, and then the newbie landlords get in this forum and moan about how tenants just don't respect their landlord's property, and they get ten other newbies commiserating and telling them that yes, yes, yes, they're right, and their tenants are bad, bad, bad...and of course this can lead to all kinds of poor decisions.