Your IRR is the one percentage that shows what a rental really earns each year — the rent it collects, the value it builds, and the loan your tenant pays down, all rolled into a single number. Estimate yours in about two minutes, whether or not you have your figures yet.
The annualized return (IRR) your rental earns across the full hold — combining operating cash flow, loan paydown, and the gain at sale into one rate you can compare against any other investment.
Jim Miller, founder of PAM, built this model on the same assumptions PAM uses to underwrite real Milwaukee rentals — drawn from live data across Milwaukee, Racine, Waukesha, and Southeastern Wisconsin.
It reflects how an asset manager actually reads a deal: vacancy and real operating expenses in, financing and exit costs counted, and the return measured the way institutional investors measure it — not a rosy back-of-napkin estimate.
IRR isn't an abstract percentage — every point of it traces back to real dollars won or lost in operations. Four levers move it more than anything else, and each one is an operating decision, not luck.
Every ~30 days a unit sits empty erases roughly a month of rent from the cash-flow line — and the loss repeats on every turnover across the hold.
Each move-out triggers make-ready, lost rent, and re-leasing. A few extra turnovers over a hold can quietly outweigh a full point of appreciation.
Your rate and leverage set the debt-service drag. A smaller down payment lifts cash-on-cash but raises the payment — and the risk if rent dips.
Appreciation and loan paydown at sale often make up the majority of total return. Hold length and the exit assumption swing IRR as much as cash flow does.
Work through the four sections — Purchase, Income, Expenses, and Exit Strategy — then calculate to see your IRR, cash flow projection, and equity growth, with a downloadable investment report.
Fill in the required fields across the four sections; sliders cover the assumption-style inputs. When every section is complete, Calculate IRR runs the full pro forma. Answer with what's actually true for the property, not best-case hopes.
Fields marked with * are required to calculate your IRR
Complete all sections to calculate your investment returns
Three PAM numbers feed straight into the inputs above — shorter vacancy, stickier renewals, and contained risk all raise effective income and cut the drag on your return.
A 17-day average days-on-market keeps the income line full, where 45–60 vacant days quietly erase a chunk of a year's cash flow.
An 88.76% renewal rate against a ~54% norm means fewer $2,000–$15,000 turnover events eroding the cash-flow component of your IRR.
A sub-1% eviction rate over 17 years protects the bad-debt assumption that can quietly wreck a projected return.
For a leveraged buy-and-hold rental on a 5–10 year horizon, many investors target a 10–14% IRR, with conservative deals nearer 6–8% and aggressive value-add plays aiming above 15%. The right benchmark depends on your risk tolerance and what you could earn elsewhere — a residential IRR should comfortably clear a stock-index return to justify the added work and illiquidity.
Cash-on-cash measures a single year: annual pre-tax cash flow divided by the cash you invested. IRR measures the entire hold and adds the time value of money, principal paydown, and the gain or loss at sale. A property can show a modest cash-on-cash return but a strong IRR once appreciation and loan paydown at exit are counted.
IRR is annualized, so it rewards getting your money back sooner. If a property's total profit is fixed, spreading it over fifteen years instead of five produces a lower annual rate. A longer hold can still build more total wealth — it just shows up as a lower IRR. That's why IRR and equity multiple are best read together.
The 0–100 deal score blends the four things that decide a rental's quality: the IRR itself, the equity multiple, the cash-on-cash return, and the debt-service coverage ratio (how comfortably rent covers the mortgage). Each is scored against common benchmarks and weighted, so a high score means the deal is strong across all four — not just on one flattering metric.
No. The result is a pre-tax IRR. It does not model income tax on cash flow, depreciation, or depreciation recapture and capital-gains tax at sale, all of which are specific to your situation. After-tax IRR is typically lower; treat this tool as a screening estimate and confirm with a tax professional.
Start with the defaults: roughly 35–45% of effective rent for operating expenses and a 5% vacancy allowance are reasonable placeholders for a Milwaukee single-family or small multifamily. A free PAM rental analysis replaces them with a real CapEx and income-expense baseline for your specific building.
Comparable rentals analyzed into a recommended rent range — emailed to you as a one-page PAM report.
OpenCash-on-cash, cap rate, and first-year total return on the cash you actually put in.
OpenMonthly and annual cash flow after every expense and the mortgage, itemized.
OpenWhat empty days actually cost — and what a 17-day re-lease saves you.
OpenProject the wealth from holding and renting against selling and reinvesting.
OpenScore a deal on cap rate, GRM, DSCR, the 1% rule, and cash-on-cash at a glance.
OpenSkip the assumptions — get real, ZIP-level rent and a CapEx baseline for your actual property from PAM.
A calculator runs on assumptions. PAM runs on your actual address, current rent, and a no-cost CapEx baseline — so you can replace every estimate above with the real figures for your property.