Rental Property Math - Please check mine!

[Jacob Compton]

Hello all,

I am new to the real estate investing thing. I have been doing research though and would like to start learning how to crunch numbers to determine if something is a good deal or not. I purchased a property recently for me and my family to live in and wanted to test my math on that property.. here is what I have.. Please let me know if I am doing this correctly.

Purchase Price	176,000
Down payment	5280
Closing costs	7626.21
rent	1750

Expenses
Property Taxes	242.84
Vacancy (8.3%)	145.25
Maintenance (5%)	87.5
Cap Ex Reserve (5%)	87.5
Property Mgmt (10%)	175
Mortgage Ins.	139.42
Homeowners ins.	118.17
Mortgage Payment	839.84
1835.52 total

According to these numbers, I will need to charge over 1835.52 a month in rent to have positive cash flow but my area rents out for about 1750.. though it was hard finding other SFHs comparable to mine that were renting in the area.. I saw one that rented for over 2k and 2-3 around 1750 (above and below by a few dollars) so I went for that number. So this may be a bad rental property if I cant get more than 1835.52, correct? Or is my math wrong somewhere? Thanks for any help/tips/responses!

[Thomas S.]

Generally SFHs do not make for good income properties for cash flow. With only one tenant per roof expenses will be higher per tenant. Additionally SFH prices are driven by home buyers not investors, for that reason they are generally priced too high to be profitable. If you want cash flow you need to invest in multi units, the more tenants per roof the better.

SHs are a much higher risk and depend mostly on speculating on appreciation.