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.
Maine guide
Maine has the best-behaved insurance data in this entire series. Three independent sources price a $300,000 dwelling policy at $1,299, $1,272, and $1,335 — a spread of under 5%, which almost never happens. The $1,302 midpoint is genuinely one of the cheapest homeowners premiums in the United States, and the tight agreement is itself evidence: Maine's market is stable and homogeneous rather than being pulled in different directions by catastrophe exposure.
That is the good news, and it is real. It is also nearly irrelevant to whether a Maine rental works, because the property tax bill on the same house is $4,199.08 — 3.2 times the premium, and 39.7% of the entire operating expense line.
If you take one thing from this article: in Maine, price the property tax by county before you price anything else. County effective rates run from 0.78% in Piscataquis to 1.19% in Androscoggin, and Section 5 shows that spread is worth 0.41 points of cap rate on an identical house — twenty times what the entire insurance-source disagreement is worth.
There is a second thing, and it is genuinely borderline: Maine does have a hurricane deductible rule, narrower than most coastal states', and most Maine policies do not carry one. Section 2 explains exactly where the line sits.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Maine. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a Maine CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Maine insurance agent about a real quote, and a Maine real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median sale price is $428,478 (Redfin, May 2026, up 0.8% year over year). Houzeo's live-MLS page shows a materially lower $390,300 — a real spread that reflects Maine's wide regional variation between coastal southern Maine and the rural north. This article uses the Redfin figure for consistency with the rest of the series, but a buyer in Aroostook and a buyer in Kennebunkport are not looking at the same market and neither should be planning off a statewide number.
Read the full Maine guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-08-28