Multifamily Calculator
A building is not a house with more rent. Enter the rent roll unit by unit, say which ones are empty today, and see what the whole property actually leaves you: cash flow, price per unit, and what a lender will write against it.
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What changes once a property has more than one unit
- The rent roll replaces the rent
- A seller’s sheet quotes every unit as let at market. The roll is where the empty one shows up. Enter what each unit is listed at and mark the ones with nobody in them, and the answer tells you what the building earns once they are let, not what it earns today.
- Five units changes the loan
- Four units is the top of the residential box. At five a lender treats the property as commercial: it sizes the loan on what the building earns rather than on your income, and the note usually comes due years before it is paid off. Both are set under Financing, and the difference between what the loan-to-value allows and what the income supports comes out of your pocket.
- Price per unit is how buildings get compared
- Two buildings at very different prices can be the same deal. Price per unit and rent per unit are what let you set them beside each other, and beside what else has sold nearby.
- Running costs are a bigger share than people expect
- On a small apartment building, operating costs usually land between 40 and 50% of the income before any mortgage. Well under that usually means something is missing rather than a bargain: water and sewer, trash, common-area power, lawn care, snow, or a resident manager.