Should I rent out my Herriman house instead of selling it?

Sometimes keeping your Herriman house as a rental is the right move. More often it is not, and the reason people do it anyway is that selling feels final and renting feels like keeping your options open.

Here is the test I give clients, and it settles most of these conversations in about a minute: if you did not already own this Herriman house, would you buy it today, at today’s value, as a rental? If you would not, you do not want a rental. You want to not make a decision.

Why the question comes up so often in Herriman

Herriman is full of people who bought a house at one stage of life and are now at another one. Job moves, a bigger family, a move south, a divorce, aging parents. The house is usually the largest asset in the room, and the first instinct is to hold onto it.

That instinct is not stupid. It is just incomplete, because it only counts the upside.

What keeping it actually costs you

What people count	What they leave out
Rent coming in	Vacancy between tenants, and the month it takes to turn the house
The mortgage payment	Property taxes, the right insurance policy for a house you do not live in, and HOA dues if you have them
“It basically pays for itself”	Maintenance, which does not stop, and repairs a tenant will not tolerate waiting on
The equity growing	That the equity is now unavailable to you for a down payment on the next house
Nothing	Management, whether you pay for it or do it yourself at 11 p.m.

The line that matters most is the one about equity. If you are buying another house, the money in the Herriman house is usually the money you need, and keeping it as a rental means finding the down payment somewhere else. People discover this after they have already decided to keep it, which is the wrong order.

The parts that are not obvious

Your loan. Owner-occupied financing is written on the understanding that you occupy the house. If you are moving out, that is a conversation to have with your lender before you list it for rent, not after. And if you are buying the next house, how the lender treats your new rental income is a real constraint — do not assume a signed lease solves the qualifying problem. Ask your lender specifically, before you write an offer on anything.

Your insurance. A homeowner’s policy on a house you no longer live in is not the right policy. Call your agent. This is a cheap fix and an expensive thing to get wrong.

Your taxes. The federal home-sale gain exclusion is $250,000 for a single filer and $500,000 for a married couple filing jointly, subject to ownership and use tests (IRC §121). The phrase that matters there is “use tests” — moving out starts affecting your eligibility, and the rules are specific enough that this is a question for your CPA rather than your Realtor. What I will say plainly is that people who rent a house out for several years and then sell sometimes find the decision cost them more in tax than the rent earned them. Ask before, not after.

The primary residential exemption. Utah’s primary residential exemption is 45%, meaning owner-occupied homes are taxed on 55% of market value (Utah Code 59-2-103). A house that stops being someone’s primary residence is a different category, and there is paperwork attached. Why property tax bills in Herriman go up covers how Utah valuation works, and what property taxes look like in Herriman covers the baseline.

When keeping it is genuinely the right call

I am not against rentals. I am against accidental ones. Holding makes sense when:

• You want to be a landlord. Not “would not mind.” Want to. The people who do well at this treat it as a business, budget for maintenance, screen tenants properly and have a reserve.
• The house works as a rental on its own numbers, with vacancy, maintenance and management all counted — not just payment versus rent.
• You do not need the equity for the next purchase.
• You are leaving temporarily and know it. A two-year assignment with a real return date is a different situation from “we might come back.”
• The house has an obvious rental advantage, like a legal basement apartment that lets it produce two incomes. Buying a Herriman house with a basement apartment covers what makes one legal and what does not.

When selling is the better call

• You need the equity for the next house. This is the most common one by a distance.
• You will be far away and do not want to manage it or pay someone to.
• The house needs work you have been putting off. A tenant will not put it off for you, and deferred maintenance gets more expensive under a renter, not less.
• You do not actually want to own a house in Herriman in ten years. If that is true, the question is not whether to sell but when, and the timing post is the one to read next.
• You would be a reluctant landlord. Reluctant landlords make slow decisions about repairs and tenants, and slow decisions are what turns a rental into a loss.

The middle option people forget

You do not have to choose between selling now and holding for a decade. Selling later is also an option, and so is renting for one defined term and reassessing. What makes that work is deciding the term in advance and writing down what you would need to see to keep going. What makes it fail is drifting into year four with a tenant you inherited and a roof you have not looked at.

If part of what is stopping you is not knowing what the house would actually sell for, get that number before you decide anything. Deciding to rent because you assume the sale price would disappoint you is a bad reason, and it is usually wrong. Start with a valuation, then decide.

What I would do in your position

Get three numbers before you choose: what the house would sell for today, what it would actually net you after costs, and what it would realistically rent for with a month of vacancy built in. Then apply the test at the top — would you buy it today as an investment.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and I have watched clients do well as landlords and I have watched clients spend four years quietly losing money on a house they could not bring themselves to sell. The difference was almost never the market. It was whether they chose it on purpose.

How selling a house in Herriman actually works is worth reading either way, so you are comparing a real process to a real process. If you do become a landlord, what Utah renters are legally entitled to is the other half of the job, and the 30-day deposit deadline in it is not advisory.

If you want the three numbers and a straight read on which way to go, get in touch.

Note: General information, not tax or legal advice. Tax rules, rates and deadlines change and vary by county — confirm anything here with the county assessor or treasurer and with your own CPA before you act on it.