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.
Nevada guide
Nevada is the easiest state in the West to read an insurance declarations page in, and that is not a compliment about the coverage.
There is no hurricane deductible, no named-storm deductible, and no percentage wind-and-hail deductible convention. Nevada is absent from the Insurance Information Institute's list of nineteen states plus D.C. that use hurricane or named-storm deductibles — unsurprising for a landlocked desert state — and it is also absent from Insurify's national ranking of states by average wind/hail deductible. A standard Nevada homeowners policy applies one flat all-perils deductible to every covered loss. After Florida's statutory 2%/5%/10% menu and Colorado's percentage hail deductible, that is a genuine relief.
The premium is cheap too: $1,798 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, roughly 60% to 65% of the national average, 6.51% of gross rent on the worked example, and only 0.72 times the property tax bill. Nevada has no state income tax. Property tax on paper is 0.48%.
Here is the problem, and it is not on the operating statement.
Effective January 1, 2026, Nevada became the first state in the country to give insurers explicit legal authority to remove wildfire coverage from a standard homeowners policy — either selling it back as a standalone wildfire-only product or excluding it with no replacement offered. That is AB 376. And Nevada has no FAIR plan: AB 437, which would have created a state-administered carrier-funded insurer of last resort, died in the 2025 session.
Which leaves Nevada in an unusual position: the only state that permits wildfire exclusions on standard homeowners policies without a residual market able to sell wildfire-only coverage to the people excluded. For a landlord, that is not a budgeting problem. It is a risk to the asset itself.
If you take one thing from this article: in Nevada, do not ask what your deductible is. Ask what perils are still on the policy.
Read the full Nevada guide →18 min read · Updated 2026-08-28