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.
West Virginia guide
Every other article in this seven-state batch spends a large section on a percentage deductible: Nebraska's 1.45% wind/hail, South Dakota's 1.81%, Rhode Island's 5% hurricane cap. West Virginia does not have one.
That is not an omission and it is not an oversight in the data. It was checked. West Virginia is absent from the NAIC's list of nineteen states plus DC with hurricane or named-storm deductibles. The state Offices of the Insurance Commissioner's consumer property materials describe no separate percentage wind/hail deductible as standard. West Virginia sits outside the Plains hail belt where that convention took hold. Individual carriers offer buy-up wind/hail deductibles here, as they do almost everywhere, but no source establishes them as the prevailing structure.
One flat $1,000 deductible applies to everything.
Combine that with the cheapest entry price in this group — a $274,142 statewide median — and one of the lowest property tax rates in the country at 0.55%, and West Virginia becomes the clean case: the state where you can watch the rental arithmetic work without a catastrophe complication sitting on top of it.
It is also the state where the arithmetic comes closest to actually working. The worked example below is $89.81 a month short on the naive rent-versus-PITI test, the narrowest gap in this batch. And Kanawha County at its own $165,000 median gets to -$263.88 a month with a 4.07% cap rate and a 0.68 DSCR. Still negative. But close enough that a modest change in rent or price flips it — which is exactly why the sections on what people leave out matter more here, not less.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in West Virginia. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Talk to a West Virginia CPA about tax treatment, a licensed West Virginia agent about a real quote, and a West Virginia attorney about anything contractual — which you will need anyway, because West Virginia requires one.
Read the full West Virginia guide →23 min read · Updated 2026-08-28