Townhouse

[Michael E.]

Kinda new to real estate investing, looking to invest primarily for long term wealth building and diversification, don't necessarily need the cash flow now.

Property is ~$120,000 townhouse (3 BR, 2 BA, 1400 sqft), rent is about $1200/month (although that's a big unknown, so that's a conservative estimate.) As a quick and dirty figure, I'm assuming all operating expenses (vacancies, insurance, taxes, maintenance, repairs, etc) to be 50% of rent, so about $600/month.  

I was originally thinking of a 20 yr loan, but the first bank I talked to said they only offer 15 and 30 years for investment properties, and I'd rather pay it off sooner rather than later. 3.75% for 15 yr or 4.375% for 30 year. Will put 20% down, so that's a loan of $96000 and a payment of about $700/month. So that's about $1200 of negative cash flow per year before tax (or I could go with the 30 year loan and it would be +$1450/year, but I'd be paying $65k in interest rather than 30k in interest, and I wouldn't have the property paid off until I was in my 60's rather in my 40's.)

I'm conservatively assuming 1.5% appreciation rate, and 2.5% annual increase in rent and expenses. Cap Rate based on cost is around 6%. Cash on Cash return is negative due to the negative cash flow, but Cash on Cash with Equity is >12% in first few years, around 6.5% by year 15. Modified internal rate of return after 15 years is 9.6%, and would have ~9k/year of positive cash flow starting in year 16.

I tried to be really conservative in all the numbers (rent might higher, operating expenses might be lower, and appreciation might be better than 1.5%/year) but how does this property look?