Single Family Buy & Hold

Buy & Hold underwrites a house as a long-term rental: what it costs to own, what it earns each month, and what's left after the loan is paid. The workspace walks you through three sections, and the analysis updates live as you type.

1 — Purchase & Financing

Enter the purchase price and how you'll fund it. Down payment and closing costs each accept a dollar amount or a percentage of the price (flip the $/% toggle), and the hints show the other side live — what you're financing, and the loan payment that follows from your rate and amortization. Add rehab cost here if the property needs work before renting. Together these set your total cash invested, the base your cash-on-cash return is measured against.

2 — Rental Income

Enter the gross monthly rent, any other monthly income (parking, storage, laundry, pet rent), and your vacancy rate. Gross annual income minus the vacancy allowance is your effective gross income — the income line everything downstream builds on.

The rent is your assumption — Mogul Deal Evaluator doesn't fill it in for you. Test it against the comps evidence in Market Insights and local listings before leaning on the results.

3 — Operating Expenses

Expenses come in two groups: fixed costs (taxes, insurance, and the like) and management & reserves — property management and a capital-expenditure reserve, each entered as a rate or dollars with a live mirror of the other. An expense-ratio meter shows your total against effective gross income as you go.

Reading the results

• Monthly cash flow — what's left after vacancy, operating expenses, management, reserves, and the loan payment.
• Cap rate — NOI relative to the purchase price: the property's yield before financing.
• Cash-on-cash — annual cash flow against your total cash invested: what your money earns.
• DSCR — how comfortably NOI covers the loan payment; the number a lender reads first.
• Break-even rent — the monthly rent at which cash flow hits zero. The workspace shows how much cushion your rent has above it (or how short it falls).

The "Where the rent goes" view turns the same math into a picture — every dollar of gross rent split across vacancy, operating expenses, and debt service, with what's left over. If the cash flow surprises you, this is the fastest way to see which slice ate it. Each headline metric is also measured against your targets, so pass/miss reflects your criteria. (An equity multiple is deliberately not shown here — it needs a multi-year hold and exit, which this single-year snapshot doesn't model.)

Scenarios worth running

Clone the analysis and change one thing at a time: the rent you're confident in vs the rent you're hoping for; the negotiated price vs asking; your loan quote vs a higher rate. The compare view puts them side by side — that spread is your real risk picture.

If something looks wrong

• Cash flow looks too good — check that management and capex rates aren't still zero, and that the vacancy rate is realistic for your market.
• DSCR reads N/A — there's no debt service to divide by yet; complete the financing inputs.
• "Needs more inputs" — price and rent are the minimum for the rental math to run; the progress card lists exactly what's missing.