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[quote=Anonymous]We rented a NoVA home we moved out of, but then we decided to sell it. It wasn't that we hated being landlords, it was more because there was a lot of appreciation in the house and we weren't going to keep it forever and wanted to avoid the tax hit.

I think investing in rental properties is a good idea if 1) you can handle the work of being landlords, and 2) the properties you rent out are in a high-demand area without a lot of empty comparable rentals available as competition. We rented our house out ourselves, using Zillow to find the tenants. FWIW, this can be a lot more work than you might imagine, so be prepared for that. We had a huge amount of interest, but not all of it genuine, and that took up a lot of time to deal with. Sounds like you think you will have access to tenants without having to find them on Zillow or something similar though? My DH is handy, so he handled most repair issues himself. When we looked into management companies they all wanted a month's rent to find a tenant and another month's rent to manage the property, and that seemed like too much to us, it would have cut into our profit, so we handled everything ourselves. It was very easy -- but only because we found a great tenant and they renewed.

We are lawyers, and so I think that helped when we drafted the lease. I looked at a variety of forms, and then cobbled something together that made the most sense for our property/situation.

Keep an eye on interest rates -- it might not necessarily make sense to pay "cash" for the properties. Or at some point if rates go down, and rents go up, you might want to pull cash out by mortgaging.

This can be a great way to make money, as long as things go smoothly. But it's a nightmare and can end up costing you money if things don't. So there is risk involved. For us, we mitigated risk by requiring a very high credit score for people to even apply, which you can do in VA but I'm not sure you can do in jurisdictions that are less landlord-friendly like DC.

I don't regret selling the house we were renting out, but given the state of the world I thought long and hard about it, because I liked the idea of having that money in real property. It's a gamble though. [/quote]

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