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. 

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

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.

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

- more and more offenses are becoming felonies to keep those prisons full and producing income.

Resolution 2023-10-03, passed by the Board of Commissioners in October 2023, mandates that all short-term rental unit (STRU) cleaning companies must pay a fee to dispose of the waste produced at the overnight rental units they clean.

While, Yes, it is saturated, you can still find STRs that produce. 

Because Atlanta is so big , to me, moving to the area seems like it would produce the information that you need on the neighborhoods within the various counties as well as letting you get to know what the local neighborhood people value for a rental. 

If/when tenant does decide to buy it, lets say the total sum between rent credits and purchase option payment was $8,000, you can either take $8,000 off the purchase price or as i would prefer, keep the purchase price but produce a receipt as if the tenant already gave you $8,000 in EMD toward the purchase price so it would count as part of their down payment and make it more manageable for the tenant financially to execute the purchase.

This way you can have some real estate that produces appreciation (your house hack) and diversify in a more cashflow oriented market