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.
Indiana guide
Indiana turns up on every "best cash flow markets" list, and the reasons are real: houses are cheap, there is no transfer tax at all, the statewide effective property tax rate is a genuinely low 0.76%, and prices have actually been rising — +3.57% year over year, one of the better figures in this comparison set.
There is a specifically Indiana catch buried in that low tax rate, and it is worth putting up front. Indiana's constitutional property tax caps are not one number. They are 1% of gross assessed value for an owner-occupied homestead and 2% for other residential property, and a rental sits in the 2% band. On top of that, the Homestead Standard Deduction and the Supplemental Homestead Deduction both require the owner to occupy the property. A rental gets neither.
So the tax bill on the listing is not the tax bill you will pay, the ceiling on your bill is double the seller's, and the gap has been moving — Indiana's 2025 property tax reform is phasing the standard deduction down and the supplemental deduction up over several years. If you underwrite an Indiana rental from the seller's current tax bill, you will be wrong, and you will be wrong in the expensive direction.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Indiana. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Indiana property tax is administered county by county and the deduction structure is mid-phase-in under 2025 legislation; insurance is priced per structure. Talk to an Indiana CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Indiana insurance agent about a real quote, and an Indiana real estate attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full Indiana guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28