Rental Deal Analysis

Objective: quickly screen an opportunity and decide whether it looks strong enough to pursue as a rental investment.

What matters most

Read the property return, financing effect, cash-flow burden, and assumption support together. No single metric decides whether the deal is attractive.

• Unlevered IRR: Annualized property return before financing. Use it to assess the underlying property.
• Levered IRR: Annualized return on your invested cash after debt service and sale proceeds. Compare it with unlevered IRR to see whether financing helps or hurts the projected return.
• Year 1 NOI: Effective gross income minus operating expenses, before capex and mortgage payments.
• First positive cashflow year: The first projected year where pre-tax cashflow becomes positive.
• Year 1 cash flow: Pre-tax cashflow after operating costs, reserves, and debt payments.
• Initial cash investment: Cash needed up front after financing.

How to read the two badges

The badges answer different questions. Neither badge is a recommendation to buy or avoid the property.

• Profile badge — High Growth, Growth, Preservation, or Defensive: Describes how the property is expected to generate returns from current income, rent growth, appreciation, and location characteristics.
• Preservation: Usually describes an established rental market where stable income and modest growth matter more than rapid expansion. It does not mean the investment is automatically safe.
• Support badge — Supported, Aggressive, or Unsupported: Rates whether the supplied market evidence reasonably supports the underwriting assumptions behind that profile.
• Supported: Current income and the main rent-growth and appreciation assumptions reasonably fit the available evidence. It does not guarantee the forecast.
• Aggressive: Some evidence supports the assumptions, but one or more important inputs are optimistic or not directly confirmed.
• Unsupported: A major assumption conflicts with the evidence or lacks enough credible support to rely on in this screening.

U.S. and France location insights

• United States: ACS census-tract estimates provide rent, bedroom-level rent, household income, household count, home value, and historical growth context. The analysis compares entered rent growth and appreciation with annualized local history when available.
• France: INSEE Melodi commune data provides population, households, dwellings, vacancy, employment, standard of living, poverty, and annual trends. The property IRIS is shown for location context, while the numeric indicators remain commune-level.
• French charts: Population and employed residents use absolute counts; dwelling charts show total and vacant dwellings; poverty is shown as a rate. The vacancy card also compares vacancy-rate growth with total-dwelling growth.
• Different evidence: Current French indicators describe demand, affordability, occupancy, and economic conditions, but they are not direct market-rent or property-value history. The commentary must not treat them as such.
• Missing neighborhood details: For both countries, the commentary cautiously infers factors such as schools, transit, parks, safety, hazards, groceries, and hospitals from broader location knowledge. Verify important claims for the exact address.

Mindset for assumptions

Real estate investing works best when assumptions are conservative and realistic for rent, rent growth, expenses, and appreciation.

• Use location insights to anchor assumptions to neighborhood trends.
• For U.S. properties, compare rent growth and appreciation with the available ACS history.
• For French properties, use household, population, vacancy, dwelling, employment, standard-of-living, and poverty trends as context; verify rent and value assumptions with local comparables.
• Estimate rent from comparable listings and neighborhood quality (jobs, schools, safety, transit).
• Review sensitivity results and test combined downside conditions, not just one changed input at a time.
• Choose assumptions that are more likely to be met or exceeded than missed.

Input fields in plain English

• Purchase price: Price you expect to pay.
• Acquisition closing costs: Buyer-side closing costs as percent of purchase price.
• Expected monthly rent: Monthly rent when occupied.
• Annual rent growth: Your yearly rent increase assumption.
• Annual property taxes / operating expenses: Core recurring yearly costs.
• Expense inflation: Annual growth applied to operating costs.
• Annual appreciation: Yearly property value growth assumption.
• Mortgage interest / duration / down payment: Financing terms that shape cashflow and risk.

Output sections

• Investment takeaway: Shows the return profile, evidence-support rating, strengths, and concerns.
• Investment commentary: Explains the main return drivers, assumption support, cash-flow risk, and recommended checks.
• Location insights: Shows available ACS or INSEE metrics, trends, charts, and the neighborhood profile.
• Return metrics: Fast snapshot of cash needed, cashflow, NOI, and IRR.
• IRR vs Rent chart: Shows how sensitive 20-year IRR is to rent assumptions.
• Return by holding period: How levered/unlevered IRR changes with sale timing.
• 20-year sensitivity: How much IRR changes if one key assumption increases by 5%.
• Annual cash flow projection: Year-by-year operating and financing outcomes.