Let's say your mortgage payment on a house is 10,000. Unless your being creative like renting the place out room by room, splitting the home up into units and renting each out desperately, short term rentals and stuff like that you won't be able to pay all your bills (property tax, mortgage, insurance, maintenance, capital expenditures like roofs, furnace etc) with the rent money you get.

Now in condos I find that you come much closer to cash neutral (rent paying tax, insurance, maintenance, condo fees, mortgage) than homes.

This is based off 20% down.

In Toronto if you want to make a condo deal work you need to find something that will be cash neutral at least and the easiest way to get there is 25% down.

You can put down more if you want but remember that the beauty of RE is leverage aka making a 5% return via appreciation on 500k value of a property is 25k but you only put down 125k so you made 25k on your 125k investment.

At 1800/mo rent I'm guessing you are not talking about Toronto proper so deals may be easier to come by since the farther you get from the core, the better the prices will be but remember that the farther you stray away from the core, the more volatile things will get during down times which can last ages.

If you don't mind me asking, what area were you looking at?