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.
North Carolina guide
North Carolina is the state that proves expenses are not the problem.
Its effective property tax rate is 0.66% — the lowest of the eight states in this series. Mecklenburg and Wake counties both sit at 0.71%. Insurance in the Piedmont runs $2,424 to $2,850. Put a Charlotte rental through the full analysis and property tax plus insurance come to 19.39% of gross rent, the best combined burden in this whole comparison, and the operating expense ratio lands at a healthy 41.94% of collected rent.
And the property loses $938.54 a month.
The reason is the number nobody markets: $2,400 of rent on a $445,000 house is 0.54% a month. That is the thinnest rent-to-price ratio in this series — thinner than Florida, thinner than Texas, thinner than anywhere. North Carolina prices have risen faster than North Carolina rents, and no amount of expense discipline closes a gap that begins at the purchase price.
There is a second North Carolina story, geographically separate and structurally strange, and it is worth reading even if you never buy east of Raleigh: on the North Carolina coast, wind is usually not on your homeowners policy at all.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in North Carolina. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Property tax is administered county by county with revaluation cycles that vary; insurance is priced per structure and the coastal market works differently from the Piedmont. North Carolina is an attorney-closing state, so a licensed North Carolina attorney will be at your closing — use them. Talk to a North Carolina CPA about tax treatment and a licensed North Carolina insurance agent about a real quote.
Read the full North Carolina guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-08-28