Free download · no email · Google Sheets & Excel
Free Rental Property Spreadsheet: the one-sheet deal screener
Type in a listing's price, rent, and real expenses and get the five numbers that decide a rental: monthly cash flow, cash-on-cash return, cap rate, DSCR, and the 1% rule, each with a plain YES / MAYBE / NO verdict. Every formula is machine-verified before release.
Download the free spreadsheet (.xlsx) Or use the browser calculator
What is in it
- Inputs for price, closing costs and rehab, down payment, rate and term, rent, a vacancy allowance, operating expenses, and a CapEx reserve. The hints tell you what people usually forget.
- Calculated loan amount, mortgage payment, cash invested, effective rent after vacancy, NOI, monthly and annual cash flow, cash-on-cash, cap rate, DSCR, and rent-to-price.
- A five-line deal screen with colour-coded verdicts: cash flow positive, cash-on-cash at or above 8%, DSCR at or above 1.25 (MAYBE between 1.0 and 1.25), the 1% rule, and cap rate above your loan rate.
- A one-page guide on the second tab: how to read each number and the expenses that quietly break most deals.
How to use it
- Download the file. In Google Sheets choose File, Import, Upload. In Excel just open it.
- Type over the yellow cells with the listing you are looking at. Use a real operating-expense number: taxes, insurance, maintenance, management, HOA. If it is under 30% of rent you have probably missed something.
- Read the verdicts. A deal that fails cash flow is a deal you pay to own. A DSCR under 1.20 will be hard to finance on a DSCR loan. Then change the price to see what number makes it work, which is your offer.
What it deliberately does not do
This is year-one cash math. It does not model income tax, depreciation, rent growth against expense growth, a refinance, or the sale. Those are the questions you ask once a deal passes the screen, and they need a proper model rather than one sheet. That is what the paid analyzer is for: the Lite version ($7.99 on Etsy) adds a year-one after-tax view with depreciation and a rent-versus-price sensitivity grid, and the Pro version adds a five-year pro-forma, refinance and BRRRR analysis, and stress tests. If this free sheet is enough for you, keep it. It is yours.
The formulas, so you can check them
- Mortgage payment = loan × (r ÷ 12) ÷ (1 − (1 + r ÷ 12)−12n), the standard amortization formula.
- NOI = rent × (1 − vacancy) − operating expenses. The mortgage is never in NOI.
- Cash flow = NOI − mortgage payment − rent × CapEx reserve.
- Cash-on-cash = annual cash flow ÷ (down payment + closing costs + rehab).
- Cap rate = annual NOI ÷ price. DSCR = annual NOI ÷ annual debt service. Rent-to-price = monthly rent ÷ price.
On the sample deal in the file ($235,000, $2,300 rent, 20% down at 7%, $725 expenses, 5% vacancy, 5% CapEx) the screener returns about $94 a month of cash flow, 1.7% cash-on-cash, a 7.5% cap rate, a DSCR of 1.17, and 0.98% rent-to-price: a marginal deal that cash-flows but would struggle to finance. That is exactly the kind of deal the screen exists to catch.
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Rental property calculator · DSCR · Cap rate · Cash-on-cash · 1% rule · GRM · Rental yield