Rents for 1650 (it was rented before I even closed on the purchase believe it or not) and I have a gross profit (before vacancies and repairs) of roughly 500 a month.So while I understand the doom and gloom in some of the major cities/suburbs, I think in areas like ours (manteno, rantoul - which I'm guessing you include champaign in your investing area), I think we have the perfect balance. 

The price is $525,000 and the profit is $60,000 gross and about $40,000 net if you plan on remarking through the MLS.

Gross annual income is 36,840.

If you could buy for a million (which is a whole nother discussion) then selling each for 150K would gross 1.35M.

TomRaymond linked to an interesting thread on this (Hadn't seen it before but the debate looked good but was too long to read right now) but here is a basic explanation.As stated elsewhere expect that 50% of your gross rents will go to your non-finance related expenses.These expenses include, but not limited to, Real estate taxes, property insurance, property management, any owner paid utilities, maintenance and repairs, capital reserves, advertising, legal and accounting for the property.Even if you intend to self manage make sure it works if you did pay someone because a) That is a job so you should pay yourself and b) if you really hate doing it you want to have the option of hiring it out without losing money every month.Lots of people do not formally put away reserves and will just call them big repairs for cash flow purposes (not for formal accounting and taxes).

Thing is that a business entity will offer the means to write off expenses to the income that would be difficult if not impossible to do personally.As an example, you could write off cleaning supplies to gross rents personally, but if you were audited for any reason and they see gross rents received being higher, then the expenses can be questioned and they will certainly say, "you probably used those paper towels at home" type of thing.Having a set of books in a business will allow furniture and fixture expenses and depreciation, office supplies and other business related expenses to be taken and justified.

Ballpark estimates ranging from 5% to 15% of gross rents are common.

In adding up your expenses, it comes to $6700 annually which is 56% of the gross.

For instance, using the 2% rule on $250K portfolio yields $60K gross annual rents.

I also have never heard of any rules until I came to BP.I don't follow any of the "rules" - I also evaluate all properties based on their income and expenses so that I can properly evaluate the individual property's cash flow before taxes, return (both cash on cash return, ROI), CAP rate, and anything else I want to know about the property.I would recommend looking up these definitions:GSI = Gross Scheduled IncomeVacancy RateEGI = Effective Gross IncomeNOI = Net Operating CostsOperating Costs = Taxes, Hazard Ins., Mtg.