Once you find a house that you believe would be a good rental, meaning desirable to your target market of customers (people within a couple of mile radius of the place), and all of the costs of monthly ownership that you can accurately project fall below the rental amounts that you project that you can get from your target customers, then you have a possible business asset that you can use to produce income, and have renters pay down the mortgage, while hopefully it goes up in value at least with the rest of the economy. 

We’ve looked at some of the figures, but we can’t find an easy way for this property to produce positive cash flow.We’ve mentioned our interest to our landlord.

U have a few top producers then you have the rest..

Otherwise it is nature and misquotoes , ticks, bees and spiders live outside. 

I just wasn't sure how the CSA and accelerated depreciation would be impacted should I convert it to a personal residence 2 years after the rebuild.Sharing this clarification up front would have produced better targeted responses.When you convert a rental property to a residence, nothing happens tax-wise.

I'm naturally a nice person so its not that hard for me.

That would in turn start to produce $850-ish/mo. since there wouldn't be any more expense for electric for me.

We do have access to a HELOC on the property which we leveraged to purchase our current primary residence (balance borrowed has been fully repaid at this point) but we would rather not pull that lever to roll into a new property given current interest rates and the adjustable nature of the HELOC. 

People are doing it, so presumably it works.FWIW, I invested in Japan for a few years, but lack of rent growth, lack of appreciation, concerns about natural disasters, and just general lack of confidence in the J market led me to shift focus only to the US.

Potential homeowners and renters are now prioritizing locations that offer better air quality and are less susceptible to natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and droughts.