Secrets of Rental Real Estate – Get the Hidden Returns

Learn How to Get 30%+ ROI on Rental Real Estate

I’m going to show you the hidden ways you make your money on real estate rentals that blow REITs, Crowdfunding deals, and Real Estate Notes out of the water.

There are potentially better investments (risk divided by reward) backed up by a hard asset, however, those deals are not obtainable by the average individual who does not have access to a rich and powerful network of people and who does not have a net worth exceeding $1-million.

The simple rental property is something that is accessible to everyone and today we are talking about the math behind it. So put on your propeller hats, because we’re about to talk numbers.

As a rental investor you make money four ways:

• Cash Flow

• Appreciation

• Tax Benefits

• Principal Reduction/Debt Paydown

1) Cashflow

Cashflow is your income (rents), minus your expenses and mortgage. 

For example, if your tenant pays you $1,000 a month and if your monthly expenses including principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and maintenance/occupancy reserve are $800 a month, then the $200 difference is now income in your pocket. 

The goal is to keep acquiring rentals that will increase your passive cashflow. It is this cashflow that is the money that you will live off of to be able to quit your day job. In the board game ‘Cashflow,’ you win when your cashflow is greater than your expenses. When this happens you have “escaped the rat race” and able to spend your time doing things that are more meaningful to you.

I recognize that in the Real Estate investing community there are two camps:

Cashflow focused

Simplepassivecashflow.com is on the cashflow focused bandwagon. We believe that acquiring assets (although takes more longer) that increase your cashflow is prudent way to go.

Appreciation Focused

Folks in the appreciation focused group feel that buying homes in the Midwest is silly because those “fly over States” never appreciate, and they fail to see the hidden benefits of real estate

I underwrite my deals to look at the bigger picture, knowing that it is the cashflow that will eventually replace my income from my day job. I admit that this will widely depend on what you use as the assumed average appreciation for the purchases in markets with more rapid appreciation, but appreciation is not constant – it is cyclical, and I prefer to see a steady rise. By purchasing in cashflow markets, the highs aren’t as high, but corrections aren’t as painful.

I run a passive investor Meet-Up in Seattle, and there is always an old-school investor who is investing for appreciation and was one of the unlucky folks. Basically, what happened is that they bought during the wrong time in hopes that the market would go up 5-10% every year, but instead, they are underwater. And to add insult to injury, they bought it with negative cashflow and are still losing money every month. Now that investor/gambler is in the doldrums for nearly a decade unable to do anything in terms of building his/her portfolio. 

2) Appreciation

This is the famous topic of dinner/cocktail parties where people brag that they bought their home for 200k and now it’s worth 400k and how they had incredible foresight. Well congratulations, appreciation “floats all boats – even ones with holes.” Despite how cool it sounds, appreciation is a hidden benefit that you only realize when you sell your investment property for greater than what you bought it for – it’s a paper gain. Even though you can’t live off appreciation like cashflow (unless you use a HELOC or refinance). 

Example:

So if you bought a home for 100k and it went up by 5% which is a pretty good year, your property would be worth 105K… but wait…your initial investment was 30k so now you have 35K. Here is the math.

$30K initial investment creates $5,000 this year in equity gain

5,000/30,000=16%, is the appreciation return (3x on a 5% market gain)

I’m not a fan of including this in my underwriting because I believe it is gambling, but I just wanted to show you the math behind it so you can see how your leverage is at work with government subsidized loans. It’s interesting to note that when the market goes down, more people can’t afford homeownership and turn to renting, which is good for the landlords.  While an economic downtown is generally bad for those banking on appreciation, my monthly cashflow is more resistant to economic changes.

3) Tax Benefits

Your rental is a business, and if your expenses are tracking ~50% of your income, then you will be running at a near zero profit business on paper and will not have any taxable income. If you are super-sneaky, you can also pass expenses through this business of yours, but work with your CPA first and don’t get greedy.  Taking illegal shortcuts will definitely cost you in the long run.

But wait… the cool thing about real estate is that you can take a depreciation deduction off your taxable income. This amount is dictated by taking 1/27.5th the building value of your property for the first 27.5 years of ownership. With the expenses negating your income this depreciation incentive is taking that amount off your W-2 day job income. (Side note – unlike stocks/other assets when there is a capital gain you pay taxes on the gain you can defer capital gains tax when you sell by using a 1031 tax exchange.)

Example:

100K home has a typical building value of ~$70k

$70k/27.5=$2,600 per year that you are able to write-off

$2,600 at the 25% tax rate is savings of $650 per year

Going back to the original investment: 650/30,000=2% is the tax benefits.  Not bad but I’ll take it.

 4) Principal Reduction

When you rent out your home, your tenants are paying down your mortgage a little bit each month with their hard earned money – not you. You can download a great mortgage/amortization spreadsheet by signing up with your email on the sidebar menu. In the beginning of a mortgage, most of the payment is going toward the interest payment side as opposed to the principal pay down/equity for you. Just know that you don’t realize any of these gains until you sell/refinance the property but it’s there.

100K home (with 25% downpayment) has a typical PITI payment of around $550/month. Of that 550 only ~$150/month or ~$1800/year is going to principal paydown as equity gain.

Example:

1,800/30,000=6% is the Principal Reduction benefits

 Congratulations on sticking with the article. The summary of the numbers are below:

• Cash Flow = 12%

• Appreciation = 16%

• Tax Benefits = 2%

• Principal Reduction/Debt Paydown = 6%

• Total = 36%

In this conservative example, (although there is no guarantee in anything) the total is 36% return. Pretty dang good when you compare with that mutual funds. The problem is the average person overlooks the hidden ways you can make money.

Love Hate Relationship with Appreciation

When I purchase investments I define my goal as cashflow over appreciation. Like many things in life, you can’t have it all, such as both strong appreciation and strong cashflow. I invest in the boring “cashflow markets” because I define my endgame as needing passive cashflow that I can live off of. Appreciation is something I can’t live off of since it does not appear in my bank account each month. I see appreciation as the icing on the cake or the dessert with the meal. Therefore, I remove the appreciation from my calculation/underwriting and plan for those projections. 

For the above example the total return without appreciation would be Total=20% which is not bad and still greater than the stock market.

I recognize appreciation has the potential to be a very large part of this return in terms of a colossal windfall in a good market (10% equals 40% gain with typical leverage) however there is also the potential for large downswings. Frankly, I try to simplify my life and therefore I am not cool with the volatility and is another reason I don’t use stocks/mutual funds. I tell a lot of investors who purchase homes with negative cashflow such as a $500k rental in Seattle that rents for $3,000 per month that they need to be conscious of what the numbers are telling them. If they can look me in the face and say they are investing for appreciation then I am cool with that – that is their goal. However, most people in this situation (Mom & Pops who were taught to just buy a property despite if it made fiscal sense) are clueless that they are losing money to the tune of a few hundred dollars each month in cashflow. If you every played Paigow Poker, investing for appreciation is like the “fortune bet” where you keep paying into the side bet in hopes of hitting it big one. 

For those stock-centric folks look at it this way. Appreciation in your home is similar to the gain in the price of a stock like Apple. The price of the stock goes up and down, however, the volatility is much less with rentals. There are some stocks like AT&T that produce dividends and those are similar to the cashflow from a rental. However, I don’t see many dividend stocks producing more than 4% compare with the double-digit cashflow returns from rentals.

Other hidden ways you make money that I do not consider: Equity Capture

This is when you buy a house for less than the market value. Many people say “you make your money when you buy” and this is what they are talking able. Personally, I pretty much buy at market value. I don’t have the time to do any work to find any deals which involve the arduous tasks of doing the direct marketing, tracking down leads, fix properties, or any of these active real estate investor past-times.

Another example of this is if you bought a house for $50K, put $30K into rehab (all in for $80K) and now the property is worth 100K on the open market (disregarding transaction costs) – you just created $20K of equity capture. This is a great way to acquire assets, but it requires money, time, and effort (that might have a higher and best use at your day job).

Other hidden ways you make money that I do not consider: Inflation Hedging

When your parents bought a home back in 1985, they spent about $30K on the property. Their mortgage payments were ~$100-$125 dollars per month and at that time that made up a noticeable portion of their family budget. Now fast forward to today and they are still paying the same payment (taxes and insurance have gone up). This illustrates how by having a mortgage you are locking in and hedging yourself from the inflations. Here are other reasons supporting inflation is going to be greater in the future:

I’m not saying that it’s going to be a total new world order but the best day to buy (and lock up 30-year mortgages) was yesterday and the 2^nd  best is today. Don’t use the excuse “Oh, I’m waiting for the next crash or evaluations are too high”. Instead, buy on fundamentals with healthy spreads in cashflow so when that next correction comes you are above water in terms of cashflow.

The Skinny

Rental real estate is the most time-tested wealth-building tool available to the average person. If you weren’t paying attention earlier, here is an acronym for you to explain to your naysayers who think you are crazy:

IDEAL

Income

Depreciation

Equity

Appreciation

Leverage

Real estate (not particularly your primary residence) is I.D.E.A.L.