North Carolina LTR Market

[Tim Wolak]

I am new to the real estate investing space but am looking for a long-term rental property in the North Carolina or even South Carolina area. The only issue is that when I use some of those rules I've been reading about (i.e. 1% rule) none of the properties even come close to passing the sniff test. I am aware that these rules are just for quickly sorting through deals on the surface but I still cannot seem to find anything that on the surface would even come close to producing positive cash flow.

For example many houses in the Charlotte area (I know this market is extremely hot) are selling in the 500k range but are only renting out for ~2-2.5k. It doesn't seem like a single one of these houses would be cash flow positive.

Am I thinking about this math correctly (again I'm very new to this type of analysis) or is it just extremely hard to find properties that are producing positive cash flows?