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.
Arizona guide
Arizona is the state where a rental analysis fails despite everything going right on the expense line.
The effective property tax rate is 0.48%, fourth-lowest in the country. The average homeowners premium is $2,297 at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, comfortably below the national average. There is no transfer tax at any level of government. Add those together on the statewide median house and total operating expenses land at 39.19% of collected rent — inside the 35% to 55% band that a healthy rental is supposed to occupy. In Florida the equivalent figure is 61.93%. In Colorado it is 46.24%.
And the property still loses $1,006.63 a month.
That is the Arizona finding, and it is a genuinely different one from the Gulf and hail states. Nothing here is broken. The taxes are low, the insurance is cheap, the closing is simple. The price-to-rent ratio is what does not work, and no amount of expense discipline fixes a price-to-rent ratio. If you take one thing from this article: in Arizona, the number to interrogate is the rent, not the expenses.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Arizona. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Property tax in Arizona is administered county by county and turns on statutory property classification; insurance is priced per structure, and a Rim Country property and a Chandler property are not remotely the same risk. Talk to an Arizona CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Arizona insurance agent about a real quote, and an Arizona real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median sale price is $448,407 (Redfin, May 2026, up 0.8% year over year — an actual median sale price, not a smoothed index). Other reads on the same question run from about $417,197 on a six-month aggregate of 44,772 closings up to roughly $470,000 depending on methodology, so treat $448,407 as one point in a real spread rather than a settled figure.
Read the full Arizona guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28