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.
Idaho guide
Idaho's headline property tax rate is 0.50%, one of the lowest in the country. It is also not the rate a landlord pays, and the reason is a single sentence in Idaho Code 63-602G: the Homeowner's Exemption removes the lesser of $125,000 of assessed value or 50% of assessed value from the tax rolls, and it requires the owner to occupy the property as a primary residence.
A rental gets none of it. Section 2 reconstructs what that is worth — roughly $831 a year on the property below, and 0.16 percentage points of cap rate.
The second Idaho story is insurance, and it is not the one people expect from a landlocked mountain state. The average premium is $2,076 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage — double Vermont's $1,013, and 46% above Alaska's. Idaho's catastrophe exposure is wildfire, and the market is not managing it with a special deductible. It is managing it by leaving: carrier count in the state reportedly fell from about 91 in 2023 to roughly 22 to 25 by 2025, and non-renewals jumped from about 3,900 in 2022 to 27,798 in 2023. There is no FAIR plan to fall back on.
If you take one thing from this article: in Idaho, the two numbers on the listing — the tax bill and the premium — are both the wrong numbers for you. Rebuild both from the specific property.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Idaho. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to an Idaho CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Idaho insurance agent about a real quote, and an Idaho real estate attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full Idaho guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-08-28