Anyone with a rental property - Is it better to sell our house or rent it? Is renting it out worth the headache?
by 
KayJ
ANSWERS: 6
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Sell if you can. Renting requires you to maintain the property and deal with the demands from tenants. Plus, you run the risk of tenants damaging the property and not paying rent. Lastly, you may need to re-rent every 6 months to 1 year, depending upon the term of the lease. However, given the housing market, renting may be a viable option.
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After the nightmare experience I had with doing so, I would never recommend anyone rent their house out.
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Sell it.
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That depends on whether you want to be a landlord or not. Renting property is a legitimate and worthwhile business... if it weren't, nobody would be doing it. But you need to treat it as a business, and that means there are records to keep, taxes to file, tenants to manage, property to maintain, etc. If you're up for all that, no problem... you can make money. If you're not up for all that, sell the house because you probably will not want the responsibilities of being a landlord without that mindset.
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Selling is better if you are in need liquidity from the house now, or soon. Renting can be an ordeal, however if you do proper background checks on your tenants, and pay a competent property manager you should be fine. Renting is a great way to have someone else pay for your mortgage while you improve the house. Also, as housing is in a slump right now, renting would provide you with a means to pay property taxes/mortgage/whatnot while waiting for the property value to rise in the coming years. Essentially, renters always lose. Which means that property owners always win. Unless you are required to evict them which can be quite expensive. If the quality of the house/neighborhood is such that your prospective tenants would have references/pass a background check, you shouldn't have to worry about an eviction.
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I own a rental, and the best advice I can give you is to be sure you will be able to keep up the payment on the rental as well as your primary residence. You will most likely not be able to keep it rented all the time, so be prepared to make up the difference. If you are not experienced in owning a rental, you probably should hire a rental agency to handle the worst of the disputes with the tenants. Also be prepared to have to completely re-do the entire interior in between each renter, as they will most likely leave it in a mess, and still insist that you owe them the deposit back. There are a lot of websites that give tips on how to handle that. The taxes require extensive record keeping, so you would probably need an accountant.
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