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.
Kansas guide
Kansas is the cleanest test of the Midwest thesis in this set, because Kansas gets almost everything right except the one thing that matters most.
There is no real estate transfer tax — Kansas is one of a small handful of states that levies none at all. The mortgage registration tax was fully repealed effective January 1, 2019. The effective property tax rate is 1.25%, ordinary by Midwest standards and half of Illinois's. The statewide median is $304,048. On paper, a Kansas landlord pays less friction to buy and less tax to hold than almost anywhere in the region.
Then the insurance quote arrives: $4,868 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage. That is 1.28 times the entire property tax bill on the median house, 19.32% of gross rent on the worked example below, and one of the highest figures in the country for a state with no coastline.
If you take one thing from this article: in Kansas, price the insurance before you price anything else. Not after the inspection. Before you make the offer. And read the wind/hail deductible line specifically, because it is not the number on the front of the declarations page.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Kansas. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Kansas property tax is administered county by county with locally set mill levies, and insurance is priced per structure — construction type, roof age and material, and hail history move it enormously. Talk to a Kansas CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Kansas insurance agent about a real quote, and a Kansas real estate attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full Kansas guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28