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.
New York guide
New York's statewide effective property tax rate is 1.45%. Its statewide median home price is $480,000. Its statewide average homeowners premium is $1,594.
You should treat all three of those numbers with suspicion, because New York is less a state than two states sharing a legislature, and a statewide average here is frequently a number that describes no actual property. The clearest single illustration is in the county data:
That is a 2.4x spread in effective rate inside one state, and the statewide 1.45% sits between them describing neither. In dollars: $5,910.75 of annual property tax on the Brooklyn median against $16,391.75 on the Suffolk median. The Long Island house costs 14% more and pays 2.77 times the property tax.
If you take one thing from this article: never underwrite a New York rental from a statewide number. Get the county rate, and then get the actual parcel.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in New York. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. New York City property tax in particular runs on a tax-class system with assessment caps and abatements that this article does not model, and New York has some of the most consequential landlord-tenant law in the country — see Section 7, which tells you to read the statute rather than an article. Talk to a New York CPA, a licensed New York insurance agent, and a New York real estate attorney.
The statewide median home price is $480,000. Both counties in our data sit far above it — Kings at $832,500 and Suffolk at $947,500 — which is itself the divergence story: the downstate counties pull the state median up while most of the state's land area sits well below it.
Read the full New York guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28