Cap rate, real cash flow, and return on the cash you put in — including the expenses most analyses leave out. Estimate only, not investment advice.
Estimates only — not investment, tax, or legal advice. How we calculate every figure
Estimated all-in monthly payment for a home price you have in mind.
What homeowners insurance costs in your state, and whether what you pay is out of line.
Income, savings, and debts in — max home price and qualification signal out.
A rental bought for $300,000 and sold seven years later for $394,780 nets $158,925 at closing — and owes about $24,753 of federal tax, $15,273 of it on depreciation you were required to take. Here is the math, why a sale with zero appreciation still owes tax, and the three clocks a fourth-quarter sale starts.
A leveraged rental makes money three ways and cash flow is only one of them. Here is what the other two are worth — and why the structure that maximises them is a bet, not a plan.
How to verify one specific rental deal: audit the seller's pro-forma line by line, comp a real rent, reassess the tax, age the systems, and price the offer the numbers actually support.
Set up basis correctly, claim the depreciation you are owed, survive the passive-loss rules, and know what the sale will cost — with every figure tied to the statute.
Alaska guide
Alaska inverts the pattern that governs most of this series. In Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, insurance is the line that decides whether a rental works. In Alaska it barely registers: $1,418 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, one of the three or four cheapest figures in the United States, and only 5.6% of gross rent on the property worked through below.
The property tax bill is $4,667.62. That is 3.3 times the insurance premium and 42.7% of the entire operating expense line.
So if you take one thing from this article: in Alaska, price the property tax before you price anything else — and price it against the specific borough, because Alaska's internal spread runs from roughly 0.01% in the Kusilvak Census Area to about 1.32% in Anchorage, with large parts of the unorganized borough levying no property tax at all.
There is a second thing, and it does not show up in any premium: Alaska is the most earthquake-active state in the country, and every standard homeowners policy excludes earthquake damage. Section 2 puts a number on that.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Alaska. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to an Alaska CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Alaska insurance agent about a real quote, and an Alaska real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median sale price is $420,506 (Redfin, May 2026, up 2.6% year over year — a closed-sale median, not a smoothed index). Independent reads cluster nearby: Houzeo at $399,800 and Innago at roughly $408,100 in January 2026.
Borough medians diverge less than in most states:
Read the full Alaska guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28