Estimating expenses on apartment buildings

[Tyler Wisner]

Hey everyone, I’m getting into small apartment investing, I’m looking for a 5-8 unit property at the moment, I’ve read people use the 50% rule, as a rule of thumb when making offers, does that generally include your vacancy expenses or do you add vacancy for your area on-top of that?

Also for anyone that buys apartment buildings, do you find the 50% rule is pretty accurate? If someone uses another method to assume expenses before doing their due diligence on the property to make offers I would love to hear it.