Sell personal house or turn into buy & hold

[Jason Hill]

I'll try to make this as brief as possible. In about 10 months my wife and I plan on moving. We arn't sure what to do with our current primary residence.

It's in a very desirable middle-upper middle class neighborhood. Our boots on the ground estimation is that we could get 2x P&I for rent. We will be building a house debt free so selling will help tremendously with that, however; it also means we could easily cover vacancies.

My worries are these:
1. The house is in our name (no liability protection). Would a warranty deed to an LLC work?
2. The house is in an HOA neighborhood that doesn't outright forbid rentals but, I'm sure it doesn't like them. I would pay the HOA fees of course.
3. My "Sominex" fund (nod to bawld guy) isn't huge but enough to cover one or two major repairs. I have another rental, which again I can cover both mortgage payments, however; I'm not keen on that.

So do the benefits of turning this into a rental outweigh the negatives?