You take all the revenue of the property (the rents) and subtract all the known and projected expenses. 

From that I’ll subtract CAPEX (2% on new builds, 5% on older) and leverage costs so I can get down to a pre-tax cash flow.  

You have to subtract the land value and depreciate the building over 27.5 years. 

To calculate effective rent, subtract the HOA fee from rent and then add back the value of the things that it covers for the property owner, like siding, windows, roof etc.

Because after I subtract everything my offer is typically 50-60% which obviously isn’t the most enticing.

This is evaluating my hard work finding scarce deals and putting equal value to it.The way I see it, I had a lot more risk than the flipper would have.A flipper CAN do due diligence, find out an accurate ARV, and even subtract 10, 20, 30K from the ARV just to be sure, and calculate quite accurately what the minimum profit will be he will be making.He can then say yes or no to said deal, and no big deal.Me as the wholesaler have no such luxury.

Thomas, perhaps there are some policies that work as you described, however I have personally seen whole bunch of policies that work as follow:1) If you have outstanding loan it will be subtracted from death benefits2) If you pass away the insurance company only pay out death benefits and keeps the cash value. 

A DSCR is arrived at after subtracting PITI & a realistic operating expense not a percentage.

Here is a quick way I run the numbers to see if a deal is worth looking deeper into or not:1) Find the Income: You can do this by taking the annual income of a property and subtract a - 5% vacancy factor. 

There is a lot more to figuring out how much a part costs, subtracting that from the total of the job and that is an hourly rate.