BUYER & SELLER TOOLS
Keep & Rent vs. Sell & Buy
Moving up? Compare keeping your current home as a rental against selling it and rolling the equity into your next home — with appreciation, cash flow, and the tax math most calculators skip.
Your current home
If you rent it out
Assumptions
Estimates only — not a lending quote. Talk to Ethan for numbers specific to your situation.
The keep-or-sell decision, done honestly
This is the biggest financial fork most move-up buyers ever face, and almost everyone argues it with vibes instead of math. Keeping your old home as a rental means holding an appreciating asset — often with an enviable low-rate mortgage — and collecting rent. Selling means walking away with your equity nearly tax-free and putting it to work in your next home.
The calculator runs both paths side by side over your time horizon. The keep path models growing rent, vacancy, maintenance, management, landlord insurance, higher non-primary property taxes, your existing loan amortizing down, the depreciation tax shelter while you own it — and the tax bill when you eventually sell. The sell-now path models your net proceeds after the capital-gains exclusion, compounding at the return you'd get from redeploying that equity.
The piece people miss: the tax clock. Sell while the home still qualifies as your primary residence and up to $250K (single) or $500K (married filing jointly) of gain is federally tax-free. Rent it out for more than about three years and that exclusion is generally gone — the entire gain, plus depreciation recapture, gets taxed when you eventually sell. Sometimes the rental still wins anyway. That's exactly what this tool is for.
Utah specifics worth knowing
- Utah's 45% residential exemption applies only to primary residences — convert your home to a rental and the property tax bill rises to roughly 1.8× what you paid as an owner-occupant. The calculator handles this automatically.
- Many Utah owners hold low-rate mortgages from the low-rate era, which is the single strongest argument for keeping — the calculator lets you see whether the rate advantage actually outweighs the tax and hassle costs.
- Strong rental demand along the Wasatch Front (and short-term rental potential on the Wasatch Back, rules permitting) makes the keep path genuinely viable here — this isn't a market where the rental math is dead on arrival.
- Utah has no transfer tax, so the selling-cost side of both paths is lighter than in most states.
Common questions
Should I keep my house as a rental or sell it when I move?
It comes down to four levers: your current mortgage rate (a low locked rate favors keeping), the rental cash flow after real expenses, how much untaxed gain you'd give up (the $250K/$500K primary-residence exclusion disappears if you rent long-term), and what your equity could earn elsewhere. Run all four in the calculator above — then pressure-test the answer with your agent and a CPA.
Do I lose the capital gains exclusion if I rent out my house?
Eventually, yes. The federal exclusion (up to $250K single / $500K married filing jointly) requires the home to have been your primary residence for two of the five years before the sale. Rent it out for more than roughly three years after moving and you generally no longer qualify — the full gain becomes taxable, plus recapture tax on the depreciation you claimed. This is the single biggest hidden cost of the keep path.
How does depreciation help rental owners?
The IRS lets you depreciate a residential rental's building value over 27.5 years, sheltering a slice of your rental income from tax each year — a real annual benefit the calculator credits to the keep path. The catch: when you sell, that depreciation is 'recaptured' and taxed at up to 25%. It's a tax deferral with a partial clawback, not free money.
What does it really cost to run a rental in Utah?
Beyond the mortgage: property taxes at the full non-primary rate (about 1.8× the primary bill in Utah), landlord insurance, vacancy between tenants, ongoing maintenance (a common rule of thumb is around 10–15% of rent for vacancy and upkeep combined), and 8–10% of rent for professional management if you don't self-manage. Honest expense assumptions are what separate a real analysis from wishful thinking.