You must report rental income on Schedule E and can deduct rental expenses like repairs, maintenance, property taxes, mortgage interest (allocated between personal and rental use), and depreciation for the rented portion.

If you make the person an LLC employee you can get around it, but partner does need to be careful. 

HELOCs are fine, but keep in mind that you really only want to use 50 percent of less (each) of your available equity just so you aren't creating a problem that you can't solve later if the value of your personal residences fluctuates.If you both have W2 jobs though, have you looked into getting qualified together and just getting a loan, 10 percent down each?

I've heard some rumors of Airdna skewing data a bit (I've heard this first hand and read online.)

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Imagine making millions of dollars over the course of your career and then having to pay 30-50% every year to uncle sam instead of compounding that cash over time.This is exactly what real estate professionals have learned to mitigate.To reduce their taxable income, they just buy a building every year, do a cost seg, and use depreciation to reduce their tax liability dramatically.Their personal wealth snowball grows much larger and much faster than their W2 counterparts who give most of their money back to the government each year.Following this strategy as a real estate professional is one of best ways to end up with a much larger net worth at the end of your career.

None of this has anything to do with your personal tax return.

Initially I didn't have a personal connection to the area and didn't know much about the city.

.: My question is… Do people promote buying rentals due to some sort of  personal benefit/conflict of interest?

We're based in Tampa and, in addition to personally investing, I own a mortgage company that provides financing for tons of investors.