Buy new home just to rent out current home?

[Jesse Scroggins]

A somewhat simple question, but should my wife and I buy a new home simply to rent out our current home. Currently rent two duplexes. We are wanting to get out of our current town to a nearby suburb. Unable to sell current home to fund new house as we do have a LOC tied to the house for student loans. DTI isn't an issue at this point. But i'm looking to grow RE hold properties during this time as well.

We have two options; 

buy a home 150k and rent our current home out, it would all but cover the mortgage. save up for 3 or 5 years and build on acreage and sell/rent the new 150k home to fund the the new home. looking to build a home for about 250k 

just stay in our current home without a mtg payment and save more from W-2's until we have enough to build on the acreage, we would be about 2 or 3 years away from this.

My dilemma is during this time i would be trying to triple my RE portfolio and that is priority #1, our W-2's currently and wont be funding the RE growth however. 

I just feel if we could rent current home out to cover new mortgage it would be a smart investment. I know most of the payment would simply be covering the interest with a FHA loan but would still be money from collected rent.