You have bought the next house. The old one is sitting there, and everyone has an opinion. Your realtor says sell into a good market. Your neighbor says never sell property in Las Vegas. Your brother-in-law has a story about a tenant and a bathtub.

It is the most common question we get, and the answer genuinely is different for different people. Here is how to work it out for your house, what most owners forget to put in the calculation, and the cases where we tell people to sell even though renting it out would be business for us.

Start with the arithmetic, then argue about the rest

Two numbers decide most of this, and most owners only know one of them.

What it would sell for today. Not what you paid, and not what the neighbor listed at. What a buyer would actually pay this month.
What it would rent for today. Same rule. Not what you hope, and not what a listing down the street is asking without having found a tenant.

Get both before you decide. We give the rental figure free through a rental analysis, and because SMART is a licensed brokerage as well as a management company, we can give you the sale figure at the same time. Ask for both on the form and you will have them within a business day.

The yield test, with a worked example

Once you have both numbers, the quickest sanity check is annual rent against value. Take the monthly rent, multiply by twelve, and divide by what the house would sell for.

Say a house would sell for $380,000 and rent for $2,300 a month. That is $27,600 a year, or about 7.3 percent of the value before any costs come out. This is an illustration rather than a specific property, but both figures are in the range our own Las Vegas listings are actually trading at this month.

That gross figure is not your return. Off it come property taxes, insurance, HOA dues if you have them, repairs, the turnover between tenants, and management if you use it. What is left is the real number, and whether it beats putting the equity somewhere else is a question only you can answer, because only you know what else you would do with the money.

What the test is genuinely good for is catching the obvious cases. A house that would sell for a million and rent for $3,000 is telling you something. So is a modest house that rents for more than its size suggests.

What both sides of our own book look like right now

Rather than quote a valley average that fits nobody, here is the actual spread across SMART listings on 18 September 2026, rentals and sales at the same moment:

For rent, $1,000 to $5,800 a month. At the lower end, a two-bedroom condo of 1,080 sq ft in the 89156 zip. At the upper end, a four-bedroom house of 4,874 sq ft closer to the center of the valley. In the middle, a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house of 2,036 sq ft in the northwest at $2,595.
For sale, $365,000 to $1,299,000. A two-bedroom of 1,489 sq ft built in 1982 at the lower end, and a six-bedroom of 3,647 sq ft built in 2015 at the top.

The spread is the point. Anyone who gives you a single number for “what Las Vegas houses rent for” without looking at your house is guessing. You can see everything currently available, with photographs and full detail, on our available rentals page.

The three things owners forget

Your insurance changes. A standard homeowner’s policy generally does not cover a house you no longer live in. You need a landlord or rental dwelling policy, and your agent can usually convert the existing one in a phone call. Finding out after a claim is refused is the expensive way to learn this.

Your mortgage may have something to say. Some loans, particularly ones written for an owner-occupied property, carry occupancy conditions. Read yours, or ask your lender, before you list it for rent.

The tax question is real and it is not ours to answer. Moving a former home into a rental changes how it is treated, and there are rules about the primary residence exclusion, about depreciation, and about what happens when you eventually sell. Those rules turn on your own circumstances and on timing. We are property managers and a brokerage, not tax advisers. Ask a CPA before you decide, not after. It is one conversation and it sometimes changes the answer completely.

When we tell people to sell

We manage rental homes for a living, so take this in the spirit it is meant. There are houses we would rather you sold.

When the house needs more than you want to spend. A tired kitchen, an aging roof and a failing air conditioner do not stop being your problem because a tenant lives there. They become your problem on someone else’s schedule.
When you need the equity. If the money is doing a job somewhere else, a rental that returns a few hundred dollars a month is not the right place for it.
When you will not sleep. Some people genuinely cannot be landlords, even with a manager in between. That is not a character flaw, it is self-knowledge, and it is worth more than a yield calculation.
When the numbers simply do not work. If the honest rent will not cover the mortgage, the taxes, the insurance and a realistic repair budget, renting it out is not an investment. It is a monthly subsidy with extra paperwork.

When keeping it is the easy call

The case for keeping it is usually one of these. You have a low fixed interest rate that you will never see again. The house is in a neighborhood where people want to live and homes let quickly, which in this valley tends to mean the master-planned communities with schools and parks in walking distance. The rent covers the costs with something left over. Or you are simply not certain, and renting it out for a year buys you the time to find out without closing the door.

That last one is underrated. Selling is permanent. Renting for a year is not, and a good tenant on a twelve-month lease costs you very little optionality.

Where the house is matters too, and it matters in ways that are specific rather than general. What renting out a house looks like in Summerlin is not what it looks like in North Las Vegas or Henderson, from the associations down to who applies. We have written up each of the areas we work in most on the areas we serve page.

What to do this week

Get the two numbers. Call your insurance agent and ask what a landlord policy would cost. Have one conversation with a CPA. Then decide with the arithmetic in front of you rather than on the strength of whoever spoke to you most recently.

If you want the rental figure, the free rental analysis is genuinely free and there is no obligation afterwards. Tell us on the form that you are weighing selling and we will give you both figures, so you are comparing like with like. If you would rather see what managing it with us involves first, the property management page lists exactly what is included.

Either way, get the numbers before you decide. This is one of the larger financial decisions most people make, and it is usually made on a feeling.