For rental owners
What you collect is not what you keep
Renting For Profit is about the gap between the rent a property collects and the money the owner keeps. Empty days, turnover costs, maintenance, damage nobody billed for, and fees. We put numbers on each one, with sources.
This covers short-term and long-term rentals both. The leaks are the same; only the timing differs.
Latest guides
Published 31 August 2026
Quarterly numbers
What the big landlords just told the SEC about turnover
The Q2 2026 filings from Invitation Homes and AMH: $974 per home of quarterly upkeep, 46 days empty between residents, a quarter of homes turning each year, and the four-line bookkeeping habit worth copying from them.
Read the guideMargin analysis
The margin killers: where rental profits actually leak
Five leaks, each with a number attached: days a home sits empty between residents, what a turnover really costs once lost rent is counted, per-property maintenance spend that only moves one direction, the share of deposits withheld for damage and cleaning, and the fee stack between the guest's total and the owner's payout.
Read the guideMargin analysis
Break-even occupancy: the number every rental has to clear
The occupancy rate a rental must hit just to cover its costs. The formula, worked examples for an STR and an LTR, and why a home at 80 percent booked can still lose money.
Read the guideMargin analysis
The real cost of a vacant month
A vacant month is not one month's lost rent. The full cost stack (lost rent per day, carrying costs, make-ready, placement fee) worked to the dollar, plus how a vacancy rate compounds against thin annual profit.
Read the guideMargin analysis
When raising the rent actually costs you money
The break-even math on a rent increase that pushes a good tenant out: how many months of the higher rent it takes to recoup one turnover, and the move-out probability at which the raise goes net-negative.
Read the guideMargin analysis
Self-managing vs a property manager: the real math
Management and leasing fees measured against NOI, not gross rent, weighed against the value of your time and the cost of self-managing mistakes, with a break-even by portfolio size.
Read the guideMargin analysis
The rental rules of thumb that actually hold, and the ones that don't
The 1%, 2%, 50%, 70%, management-fee and maintenance rules, each judged against 2026 data: what it claims, where it came from, and whether it still holds.
Read the guideMargin analysis
What a security deposit actually covers, and what it doesn't
The economics: what a typical deposit is worth, what a turnover and its damage really cost, and why the deposit so often fails to cover the bill.
Read the guideCost breakdown
Where the rent actually goes: the operating-expense stack
A category-by-category breakdown of where rental income goes before the owner sees a dollar: management, maintenance, vacancy, CapEx, taxes, insurance and admin, each with a sourced percentage-of-rent range.
Read the guideReturns
Cap rate vs cash-on-cash: the two return numbers that matter
Cap rate and cash-on-cash return are not the same number. Exact formulas, one worked property showing how the two diverge with financing, and the mistakes that inflate both.
Read the guide- Leak 1Vacancy: days empty, priced per day
- Leak 2Turnover and make-ready cost
- Leak 3Deferred maintenance catching up
- Leak 4Damage that never gets billed
- Leak 5Fee creep on the top line
What this site is for
The editorial line
Most rental advice is written about revenue: raise the nightly rate, fill the shoulder season, add a hot tub. Revenue is the easy half. The half that decides whether a property is worth owning is the cost side, and it is mostly invisible because it arrives as a hundred small events rather than one bill.
So the rule here is simple. Every claim on this site carries a named source, and where we cannot verify a number at its source, we leave it out and say the number is unknown. Ranges from operator surveys are labelled as surveys. Figures out of public filings are labelled as filings. Arithmetic we did ourselves is labelled as arithmetic.
The archive
Vacation rental articles, 2010 to 2014
Renting For Profit began as a membership site for vacation home rental owners. That library is still online, unchanged, including the original homepage of the era, which is preserved as a site archive.
- Ideas For Keeping Guests Interested
- Kingfisher Cottage, another success story
- Festive Check List
- How to get repeat guests
- Emergency Planning
- SEO for Vacation Rental Owners
- What Guests Want
- Hot Topics from the Cottage Life Show 2012
- Download: How to build an FAQ page
- Going Green, a vacation rental owner's guide
- The Slow Leak: how damage and deferred maintenance erode your margin
- Public articles index
About
Who writes this
Renting For Profit is written by its editors for people who own or manage rental property and want the arithmetic rather than the encouragement. Guides are unsigned by design: nothing here rests on who wrote it, only on what it cites.