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.
Florida guide
Florida has a 0.78% effective property tax rate. That is genuinely low — below the national middle, and well below Texas or Ohio. It is also almost irrelevant to whether a Florida rental works, because the insurance bill is 2.6 times larger than the tax bill.
The average Florida homeowners premium is $8,471 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage. That is not a coastal figure or a worst-case figure; it is the statewide average. On the property worked through below it consumes 27.2% of gross rent by itself, and swapping it for a Georgia-level premium would improve the cap rate by 1.42 percentage points without changing anything else about the house.
If you take one thing from this article: in Florida, price the insurance before you price anything else. Not after the inspection, not during the loan process. Before you make the offer.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Florida. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Florida insurance is priced per structure — construction type, roof age, elevation, distance to coast, and wind mitigation features move it enormously — and property tax is administered county by county. Talk to a Florida CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Florida insurance agent about a real quote, and a Florida real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median sale price for existing single-family homes is $425,000 (Florida Realtors Research Department, July 2026, up 3.7% year over year). The condo and townhouse median is separately about $295,000 — a very different number, and one that comes with association dues and assessment exposure that this article's single-family arithmetic does not model.
Read the full Florida guide →18 min read · Updated 2026-08-28