Where's all the equity coming from? Keep in mind when you're buying the house in the first place, you're competing with other people who are also potential rent

Where's all the equity coming from? Keep in mind when you're buying the house in the first place, you're competing with other people who are also potential renters. They're incentivized to bid up to whatever their rents are, which also happens to equal how much you can hope to earn by renting it out. If anything they're willing to bid even higher, given how people are irrationally attracted to housing, and how much you can hope to earn is even lower because you have costs they don't. Banks won't give you preferential rates either, because some lending to some DINK household is going to be much less risky than lending to some landlord that's levered to the hilt. Your equity accumulation will be glacial, barring change in the macroeconomic, which is by no way assured. Or mortgage fraud.