Just starting out, current home sell (and 1031) or rent?

[Ray Ochotorena]

Hi everyone, I am ready to start investing in real estate and have a situation and thought I'd reach out to see what you all thought. I am in my current home and building a custom home for my family. When it's complete later this year/early next, my plan was to move into the new home and rent my current home, thinking this would be a good transition into being a landlord. I would then take some savings and invest in a second rental shortly thereafter. 

Given the market is so hot right now and I can pocket a good profit on my current home, I'm now considering selling it and using the profits to just immediately jump into a larger property that would cashflow more. My long term goal is grow my real estate portfolio as quickly as possible. I think pros would be leveraging my equity in current home for a larger cash flowing property for my first investment. Or I can keep my current home to rent to help ease me into real estate investing and I could always sell it later with the risk being I may not be able to get as high a market price as right now. But then again, it could be even higher in a year or two... 

For someone that is absolutely 100% getting into this game with a long term goal to grow Grow GROW, how would you all handle this? Thanks in advance for any feedback!

[Ray Ochotorena]

@Dave Foster Thanks! Appreciate that info, I had heard that on a BP podcast once but totally forgot about it. I've been in my current home for 12 years. I'll be moving out to our new home in about 8-10 months. So sounds like I meet that exclusion criteria...I just need to decide if I want to make this home my first rental or leverage that profit to get into something bigger for my first rental, assuming I can find a deal at that time.