See your real return before you buy.
Most calculators give you one number. This one shows the tradeoff: borrow more and your cash-on-cash climbs while your monthly cash flow falls. Find the balance that fits how you invest.
Pre-filled with a sample 8-room deal. Change anything.
For MLS / listed deals where you cover the seller’s listing-agent commission. Leave at 0 for off-market.
Type the amount here or drag the slider below — they stay in sync. Private money (the gap loan and any borrowed entry cash) is interest-only at this rate.
Your numbers on one branded page you can hand to a lender, a partner, or your own file. It downloads the second you hit the button.
One more, only so I can actually be useful. What do you have, and what do you need?
Drag the gap loan below and watch the two lines move apart.
How the structure changes everything — run live on the deal above, with no extra private money.
Cash flow plus the equity you build from loan paydown and appreciation — at the gap loan set above.
| Year | Cash flow | Cumulative | Value | Your equity |
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Co-living means renting a house out by the room instead of leasing the whole place to one tenant. A five-bedroom home becomes five income streams, with shared kitchen, living, and laundry. Gross income on the same building usually runs well above what a standard single-family lease brings in.
The tradeoff is more moving parts: more leases, more turnover, more management, and zoning rules that change from city to city. That’s why the math has to run room by room before you make an offer. A deal that looks great at a glance can fall apart once you account for one room sitting empty, furniture, utilities, and what your financing actually costs.
Every co-living deal I underwrite runs through the same seven inputs. The Co-Living Wealth Visualizer™ above walks you through all of them and returns a verdict instead of a wall of numbers:
Many investors look for cash-on-cash returns in the low double digits, but the right target depends on your financing and how much capital you’ve left in the deal. Creative-finance structures that reduce money down can push cash-on-cash much higher. The point is to measure a specific deal against your own threshold, not a generic benchmark.
It depends entirely on local zoning, occupancy limits, and rental ordinances, which vary by city and county. Some areas welcome rent-by-the-room; others cap the number of unrelated occupants. Confirm the rules for your specific address before you buy, and check whether an HOA applies.
Most co-living deals start to make sense at four bedrooms and up, because you need enough rooms for the per-room income to clearly beat a standard lease. Five or six bedrooms usually produce the strongest spread, as long as local occupancy rules allow it.
Options run from conventional loans to creative structures like subject-to and seller financing, which can sharply reduce the cash you bring to closing. Because financing has such a large effect on cash flow, the visualizer lets you model each structure and see how the outcome changes.
Co-living tends to produce steadier income with less day-to-day management, and it’s less exposed to short-term-rental regulation and seasonality. Airbnb can earn more in peak periods but carries more swing.
This is one tool from the full system — the same spreadsheets I use to underwrite fix & flips, rentals, Airbnb, and creative-finance deals.
InvestorBuilt: Deal Analyzer puts all three calculators in your pocket. PDF exports, instant verdicts, and it works offline, even standing in a house with no signal.
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