Rent or Sell My Home

[Sam G.]

Hi all,

My wife and I live in the Raleigh/Durham area (for those who are familiar with the area, we are located by Southpoint Mall very close to the Research Triangle Park). We bought the home in 2015 for $212,000, and just refinanced back into a 30 year mortgage at 2.82%. Balance on the loan is $150k, our monthly PITI is around $940, and the current Zestimate is around $325k. Looking at other similarly sized single family homes in this area, I am confident we could rent the home out for around $1,600-$1,800/month.

After COVID hit last year, my employer made it known that employees are not expected back on site for at least another year, and there is widespread expectation that noone will be required back on site after that; really more of a personal preference on whether you'd WANT to go back to the office. For this reason, wife and I are considering a move to be closer to family (out of state). I am considering keeping the home as a rental (would use property manager), but I've read the literature here on BP as well as other sites about why renting your own home instead of selling can be a bad idea (emotional attachment, cash flow issues, sunk costs, etc.) That being said, I think the area that our home is in will only be going up in value over the next 5-10 years. It was just announced earlier this month that both Google and Apple are breaking ground on new hubs here in the Research Park, with Apple alone bringing in over 3,000 jobs that will be paying a minimum of $130k/year (lots of machine learning, AI positions). Our house sits on a 1/2 acre, wooded lot - most homes around here have postage stamp lots - 10,000 sq ft at the most. There's also no HOA, and almost every other neighborhood around here has an HOA.

Anyways - I've run the numbers through a few rent vs sell calculators, and it appears we would benefit from renting it out over next 5-10 years, but would love some input from the great minds on this forum as well. Let me know if there are additional details I need to provide. Thanks so much!

[Jordan Decuir]

@Sam G.

I was going to jump in with the capital gains tax exemption consideration. I’m not a tax expert in any way...but Yes, per the current IRS rules, you would be exempt (up to $500k for a married couple) from the capital gains tax that would be generated by the sale of a home that was your primary residence for at least 2 of the previous 5 years. So, I’d factor that tax savings into your calculations if it is likely that you would be looking to sell the home in 5-10 years (especially if you’re on the lower bound of that range) because after that 5-year mark, you would no longer receive those capital-gains exemptions. There are also other ways that you could avoid those taxes as well, a 1031 Exchange as an example.