Personally, I start all my new tenants with 6 month leases to test out the relationship before considering a one year renewal.

Blake:Disclosure - When I was buying SF rentals years ago, I was a Longhorn client.The real test is your staying-power though a bad market. 

Many times, however, tenants "go bad" and once they know they have passed the 12 month test, then their good behavior might wain a bit and you are stuck with them. 

In my experience land lords who have that length of tenant and they can show rent rolls of payments on time are ok with sub market rents because the tenant is so "easy".

It would eat up costs, but you can roll cost into the loan so you don't come out of pockets and there's no guarantee rates will come down quickly for sure.It's also worth getting a CMA on the value to see if you could refinance so that you can avoid the PMI.

Testing an aggressive growth stock / fund overlaid on the best states for growth (texas/Florida).

Do some interviews, maybe a test cleaning to see how they do.

I have heard the same but also have never had to test it.

We are considering renting a home in the neighborhood we are interested in buying in, to test it out for a few years.

The building is effectively 50% commercial and 50% residential (both in SF as well as projected rent roll).