What % of gross income for expenses?

[Yishi Garrard]

Hi, What % do you use as your "rule of thumb" for estimating annual operating expenses when evaluating an income property? Here in Tucson, AZ, most properties that I manage for clients are running between 20-28% expenses of gross rents (excluding Capex, and including management fees of 10%). so I (and my partners) run a 30% expense estimate when evaluating deals. However, I've seen a few people talk about a 50% rule. Does that 50% also include capital expenditures? I'm essentially trying to see if there's a wide variance geographically, or if somehow we've gotten lucky. (FYI, we manage about 300 doors of all different property types, so I feel like it's a pretty good sample size).