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.
Delaware guide
Delaware looks, on the operating line, like one of the easiest states in the country to own a rental. The effective property tax rate is 0.54%, among the three lowest in the nation. The average homeowners premium is $1,385 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, comfortably below the national middle. Together those two lines cost $3,537.36 a year on the property worked through below — 14.0% of gross rent, one of the lightest combined burdens of any state in this series.
Then Delaware charges you on the way in. The realty transfer tax reaches 4% of the purchase price, customarily split, and the buyer's usual half is $7,971.70 on the statewide median. That is 3.7 times the entire annual property tax bill, due in one day at settlement, and it is the number out-of-state investors miss.
If you take one thing from this article: Delaware's cost is front-loaded. The carry is cheap; the entry is not. Section 1 puts the whole cash figure together before Section 3 touches the operating math.
There is a second thing, and it is geographic. Delaware is really two insurance markets — an ordinary inland one and a coastal Sussex County one where a percentage hurricane deductible shows up on the declarations page. Section 2 puts a number on that too.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Delaware. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a Delaware CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Delaware insurance agent about a real quote, and a Delaware real estate attorney about anything contractual — in this state you will need one anyway.
Read the full Delaware guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28