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.
South Carolina guide
South Carolina's effective property tax rate is 0.50% — the lowest headline figure of the seven Southern states in this series and one of the lowest in the country.
That number does not apply to your rental.
South Carolina assesses property at different ratios depending on how it is used. Owner-occupied legal residences are assessed at a 4% ratio. Non-owner-occupied property — which is what a rental is — is assessed at 6%. Our data is explicit that this ratio, not any millage advantage, is "the larger driver of SC's low effective property tax rates."
The Tax Foundation-style effective rate of 0.50% is computed on owner-occupied housing value. Scale it for the classification you will actually hold and a South Carolina rental sits nearer 0.75% — a 50% higher tax rate on the identical house, worth $899.75 a year and 0.25 points of cap rate on the statewide median. Section 2 works through exactly how that inference is made and why you should treat it as a floor rather than a ceiling.
The second South Carolina story is geography, and it is the widest coastal/inland split in this series. Greenville County averages $1,231 of insurance. Charleston County averages $3,883 — 3.15 times as much. And South Carolina has no general FAIR plan: its only residual market is a wind-and-hail-only pool covering a narrow statutory coastal strip. An inland owner declined by the admitted market has no last-resort option at all.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in South Carolina. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. The 6% assessment inference below is an estimate; your county auditor's actual millage and assessment for a non-owner-occupied classification is the authority. Talk to a South Carolina CPA about tax treatment, a licensed South Carolina insurance agent about a real quote, and a South Carolina attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full South Carolina guide →22 min read · Updated 2026-08-28