I've done just that. My wife an I bought our house 4 years or so ago. House payments including all the interest and accompanying costs were lower if we wanted to rent a smaller crappier house in the same location at the time. Now we are moving countries and renting our place. Rent we are asking for is 50-60% higher than the costs we have and have so many people interested we may just up the rent a bit.

But I do have some experience renting places as my family has a few properties they rent and I used to manage a lot of the related work.