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.
Missouri guide
Missouri is the friendliest state in this Midwest set on paper and one of the two where insurance, not property tax, is the expense that decides the deal.
The effective property tax rate is 0.88% — the lowest of the seven states here, and less than half of Illinois's. There is no real estate transfer tax at all; the Missouri Constitution prohibits the state and its political subdivisions from imposing one. There is no mortgage recording tax. The statewide median is $299,064. A Missouri buyer pays almost no friction to get in and one of the lowest holding taxes in the region.
Then the insurance quote arrives: $3,409 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage — 1.30 times the property tax bill on the median house and 14.20% of gross rent on the worked example below. Missouri is one of the most hail-exposed states in the country, and the premium says so.
There is one more thing that a statewide rate will not tell you, and it is the largest county effect in this whole Midwest set: St. Louis County's effective rate is 1.57%, or 78% above the state figure. Section 5 puts a dollar number on that.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Missouri. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Missouri property tax is assessed and levied locally, and insurance is priced per structure. Talk to a Missouri CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Missouri insurance agent about a real quote, and a Missouri real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median sale price is $299,064 (Redfin, June 2026, up 3.1% year over year — an actual median sale price rather than a smoothed index). Zillow's home-value index reads $268,423, but that is a smoothed index and a different measurement.
Read the full Missouri guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28