Should I hold or should I sell my house to get started?

[Alison Crawford]

Hi All, 

I am struggling with a question on whether to sell my primary residence or hold it as a rental in order to start investing and could use some insight from more experienced investors. The back story is I live in a very hot town that is a high tech hot spot.  Burlington, a town outside Boston,  is building a lot of infrastructure and amenities which are attracting high income tech residents and the property values have been rising accordingly. A 4 bedroom 2 bath home sells for roughly 575-600K and in the neighboring towns the same house can go for 750-850K so there is room for the house to gain more value.  The rental income for a house like this is approximately 2700 a month which would give me about 500 a month in cash flow after running the numbers on the rental calculator based on my current mortgage.

If I sell I should clear about 200K. If I hold and pull a HE I'll get about 80K after paying off some other debts.  We need to make a decision rather soon as we are moving to another state for a new job in the next 6 weeks.  

My question is does it make sense to hold a single family in a market that the rentals are low compared to the sell price and focus on the long term value increasing or should I sell and have a clean start in a new state?

Any advice would be very appreciated.  Thanks