Well as you mentioned, there are other online forums that are good to obtain the info you mention. We're not really suppose to promote competing forums and websites, so I'll just say to do a Google search or two and you should easily find one or two very popular active forums that have forums dedicated to landlording and lease property.
A couple of very conservative rules of thumb are the 50% rule and the 2% rule..
50% Rule - Plan on 50% of gross scheduled rents going towards operating expenses such as advertising, maintenance, vacancies, insurance, taxes, etc. Plan on using the other 50% of the gross rents to pay mortgage payment. What's left over after paying the mortgage is your income.
2% Rule - You want rent to be 2% of the purchase price (including rehab cost). This rule makes the assumption that you want to make $100 per unit. It also assumes that you are financing using a 30 yr. note, 100% financing @ 6%. So if you were to buy a $25K unit, you would want to get $500 per month. Expenses should be $250 per month, mortgage payment should be about $150 per month, leaving $100 per month in cash flow.
This is just a very tip of the iceberg on this topic. There have been year long threads on other forums talking about all the different facets of these ideas. Obviously all properties won't require a full 50% of the gross rents going towards expenses, but the theory is if you had 100 different properties and you averaged all of them over a long period of time, it would come close. Obviously if you have one property and you have to replace a roof and put in an HVAC system during the middle of the lease, you have just blown your expense calculation out of the water.
I only have one whopping rental right now and I'm pretty new, so maybe some of the more tenured landlords will offer information about their experiences. My rental doesn't quite give me 2%, but it's close enough for me. I have it financed at 100% and I have no out of pocket. So I own the house, it's making me a little money each month and I don't have any of my own money invested, so I'm happy. I'd just like to find 6 to 10 more just like it! Yes, I know, the more you own the harder it gets to get them financed.
In the end these are just a couple of easy to remember rules that I can quickly do in my head that allows me to decide if it's something that might be worth looking into.
Joe - Realtor
Exclusive Homes Realty
682-777-0836
