@Nick Causa the reason is when lending to a consumer, the lending laws become much more strict with all kinds or regulations that are not needed for commercial loans.

In the case of property management for a single property you will spend about 18-25 hours per year handling all of the items required from routine maintenance, new maintenance, collections, banking, renewals, tenant issues, accounting, city requirements, and that is if there is no turnover with comes with an entire new other list of items to address(Add another 10-15 hours).  

Obviously you will drive people out by not taking care of routine maintenance requests or raising the rent beyond market rates.

So from a strict dollars and cents perspective every year you can defer that $16K of taxes is a win. 

From what I know (and I do not have an investment there), Mammoth has very strict regulations on STRs, and only condos are permitted as STRs, single family homes are not.  

The sale prices shown are strictly the financed amounts.

Simple routine process.

But for USDA they are very strict about borrowers owning other property.

As for Quicken/Rocket Mortgage...I would steer clear of them...just my opinion though...they are littered with inexperienced loan officers who work in a call center aka sweat shop type environment who are strictly numbers driven.

Boulder has strict rental laws as well, so scratch the idea of adding a third bedroom using the back porch and renting it out.