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.
Ohio guide
Ohio is the state people mean when they say "the numbers work in the Midwest." Houses cost a fraction of what they cost in the Sun Belt, insurance is among the cheapest in the country, and rent-to-price ratios that would be impossible in Charlotte or Orlando are ordinary here.
All of that is true, and it is not the whole picture. Ohio also carries an effective property tax rate of 1.36% statewide and 1.80% in Cuyahoga County — higher than Florida, higher than Georgia, higher than North Carolina, and close to Texas. On a cheap house, a high tax rate does more damage than it looks like it should, because the tax bill does not scale with the rent.
What Ohio genuinely offers is the cleanest demonstration in this whole series of why the three "invisible" expenses matter. The worked example below shows a property that cash flows if you leave vacancy, management, and capital reserves out, and loses $342.62 a month once you put them back. Same house. Same rent. Same loan. That flip is the single most important thing on this page.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Ohio. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Ohio property tax is levied by thousands of individual taxing districts and reappraised on a county cycle; insurance is priced per structure. Talk to an Ohio CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Ohio insurance agent about a real quote, and an Ohio real estate attorney about anything contractual.
The statewide median is $245,500 (Redfin data as of January 2026, up 6.2% year over year). That figure is genuinely disputed: Houzeo, drawing on live MLS feeds from Northern Ohio, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton, cites $287,000. Direct verification against Ohio REALTORS and Redfin was blocked in the research pass, so treat Ohio's statewide median as a $245,500 to $287,000 range rather than a point. County figures are firmer and more useful anyway:
Read the full Ohio guide →20 min read · Updated 2026-08-28