Rental property analysis: should I look beyond COC?

[Dean Attali]

I'm looking to acquire a few rental properties around the ~$150k price range, and recently I've touched based with a very popular turnkey company. The deals they sent me looked good initially because they advertised ~15% ROI over the first year, which sounded amazing!

But when I looked into the numbers, I noticed that the actual COC return was below 5%. They added "Appreciation" and "Equity Accrued" to the spreadsheet, that together bring up the number to 15%. This is not in an expensive or crazy appreciating market (such as FL, YC, California), it's in the midwest, so appreciation is not really a huge metric I'm after.

In many of the podcasts and webinars, I've learned that Brandon's and others' philosophy is to aim for 10+% COC, and that does seem to make sense to me. What do you generally look for in a rental property in non-luxury markets - just COC, or should I accept this turnkey company's analysis that the real return is much higher than just the cash return?

[Larry Fried]

Never accept a seller's projections, always check the numbers.  Equity accrued comes from principal pay down, so that can be a real figure, but it is not cash flow.  Appreciation is entirely speculative.  In both cases you won't see those dollars until you sell or refinance and pull out some equity.  5% cash flow on a midwest home if you are financing with 20-25% down is too low in my view to bother with.