Editorial Standards

This page covers three things: who answers for what appears on RentalPropertyCalc, how a calculator or a guide article actually gets produced, and where the numbers behind them come from.

Who is accountable

Chris Terry owns RentalPropertyCalc and is accountable when a calculator misbehaves or a figure goes stale. The guide articles are written and kept current by Jessica Martinez, whose byline appears on each one.

How a calculator gets built

Each of the four tools starts from a documented formula: cap rate as net operating income over price, cash-on-cash return as annual pre-tax cash flow over cash invested, the 1% rule as monthly rent measured against purchase price. Every formula gets tested against hand-worked examples before it ships, and the assumptions a calculator uses, a vacancy default or a management fee percentage, are shown on the page itself rather than hidden in the code.

Where the figures in the guides come from

Numbers referenced in the articles, expense ranges, cap rate bands by market type, IRS reporting rules, come from public sources: IRS Schedule E guidance, HUD program pages, and standard real-estate underwriting practice. Where a figure genuinely varies by market or by year, the article says so rather than presenting one number as a universal answer.

The 2026 metrics reference

The 2026 metrics reference is built directly from this site's own calculator formulas rather than a third-party survey, so the worked examples on that page always match what the four calculators would return for the same inputs.

Corrections and independence

A few outbound links on this site pay a commission if you click through and take an action; that arrangement has no bearing on which formula or figure appears anywhere else on the site, since the underlying math does not shift based on who is paying for a link. If something is wrong, a stale cap rate range or a calculator bug, flag it and expect it to get fixed rather than defended.