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 Dakota guide
North Dakota is the state in this dataset where the honest answer is most often "the data is thin, and here is exactly how thin."
That is not a hedge and it is not an excuse to skip the arithmetic. It is a finding that changes how you should underwrite. In a state where consumer-facing figures are noisy — where the statewide median sale price ranges from $290,642 to $335,000 depending on which source you pick, where the wind/hail deductible rests on one quote-database study with no statute or regulatory bulletin behind it, and where the housing finance agency's own income limits could not be confirmed from a live page — the right response is to run your model at both ends of every range and see whether the answer moves.
For North Dakota it does. Section 5 shows the price range alone is worth 0.57 percentage points of cap rate and $255 a month of cash flow — more than any single expense line in the analysis.
Two things are firm. The first is the insurance premium, which is the one figure here with tight agreement between independent sources. The second is that North Dakota has no FAIR Plan — no insurer of last resort of any kind. That one is confirmed from three directions, and it is the most consequential fact in the article.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in North Dakota. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a North Dakota CPA about tax treatment, a licensed North Dakota agent about a real quote, and a North Dakota attorney about anything contractual — which you will need anyway, because North Dakota requires one.
Read the full North Dakota guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28