You Don't Have to Profit if You Don't Want To

Let's say you have a single-family house with extra space on your lot. You could build another little house on your property and rent to some tenants. In San Diego, people are doing this. The market rate for an apartment is high. You could make money this way.

But what if you don't want to make money? You don't have to make money if you don't want to. At least, you don't have to make money over what it takes to make it sustainable for you to provide this housing.

If you want this housing to pay for itself, it should provide for its own construction costs. It could take you a decade to pay off the construction costs, renting at market rate. But after that, it's like if you've paid off your mortgage on your house. You just have to pay property tax, maintenance, and utilities.

Dealing with tenants is sometimes stressful, and maybe you have to price that in for it to be sustainable for you to provide this housing.

And there might be other factors to consider that I'm not aware of, and I guess in some cases they may force you to rent at market price, or not rent at all.

But once you take care of all the factors you have to, in order to sustainably rent your property, you can charge as little additional as you want. So you don't have to profit if you don't want to. You can just pay yourself for your costs and your work.