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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