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.
Georgia guide
Georgia is the best-behaved state in this series on the expense side, and it still does not cash flow at the median.
That combination is worth sitting with, because it isolates something important. Georgia's property tax rate is a low 0.78%. Its insurance is $2,453 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage — less than a third of Florida's. Its percentage wind deductible applies to only six coastal counties rather than the whole state. Put a Georgia rental through the full analysis and its operating expense ratio lands at 42.53% of collected rent, comfortably inside the healthy band and better than any other state in this comparison.
And the worked example below still loses $633.14 a month.
The reason is not an expense. It is the ratio of rent to price, and it is the thing most rental analyses spend the least time on. Georgia is the cleanest demonstration in this series that you cannot expense-manage your way out of a bad purchase price.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Georgia. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Georgia property tax is administered county by county with local exemptions that vary considerably; insurance is priced per structure. Georgia is an attorney-closing state, which means a Georgia real estate attorney will be involved in your closing anyway — use them. Talk to a Georgia CPA about tax treatment and a licensed Georgia insurance agent about a real quote.
The statewide median sale price is $360,000 (Georgia REALTORS Research Department, year-to-date through June 2026, up 0.3% year over year). Other sources read higher — Redfin's June 2026 statewide median is $373,830, and another aggregator reports $389,900 — so the honest range across sources and time windows is roughly $360,000 to $390,000 depending on methodology. This article uses the state Realtor association's figure.
Read the full Georgia guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28