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.
Vermont guide
Vermont has the cheapest homeowners insurance in the United States. Two independent surveys, both quoting $300,000 of dwelling coverage, put it at $1,017 and $1,008 — agreement within 1%, which almost never happens, and both rank Vermont either first or second cheapest nationally.
Vermont also charges a landlord 3.62% of the purchase price in transfer tax on the way in, against a blended 1.01% for an owner-occupant. On the statewide median that is $15,337.94 instead of $4,288.39 — an $11,049.55 penalty, paid in one day at closing, and in Vermont the buyer customarily pays it.
That $11,049.55 is 10.9 times the annual insurance premium. You could insure this house for eleven years for the difference.
If you take one thing from this article: in Vermont, the expensive lines are the ones that only apply to you. The transfer tax rate that applies to a rental, and the education property tax rate that applies to a rental, are both different from — and higher than — the published figures a buyer sees. Section 1 and Section 2 rebuild both.
There is a third thing, and it is the one that catches out-of-state investors hardest: cheap to insure is not cheap to rebuild. Vermont's construction cost is $245 per square foot against Florida's $210. The premium is a statement about risk. The rebuild cost is a statement about the building, and they are not the same number.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Vermont. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a Vermont CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Vermont insurance agent about a real quote, and a Vermont real estate attorney about anything contractual — Vermont settlements are attorney-conducted.
Read the full Vermont guide →23 min read · Updated 2026-08-28