While every investor doubtlessly has their own way of analyzing a deal, calculating and considering metrics is always a component. Net operating income, or NOI, is one of those metrics. It’s the quickest way to understand whether a particular property makes sense for your rental business or if you’re better off not pursuing the deal.
So, what is NOI? How do you calculate it, and what do real estate investors need to know about it to make informed decisions about a new property investment?
In this article, we’ll cover the NOI basics every investor needs to know as well as some tips for interpreting and applying this metric to your next deal.
What is NOI?
What is NOI, and how is it used in real estate?
Net operating income, or NOI, is a gauge of an investment property’s potential profitability. It measures the income a property will generate after regularly, monthly expenses are subtracted, but it does not consider any variable expenses such as repairs or maintenance. It also excludes the impact of depreciation, property taxes, and interest (NOI is sometimes referred to as “earnings before interest and taxes”).
Excluding these variable aspects helps you make an accurate baseline comparison between the NOIs of two or more properties based on only non-variable expenses.
Let’s break this formula down into its individual components.
Gross Operating Income
The first half of the formula is Gross Operating Income (GOI). This is the total income you receive (or expect to receive) from a rental property, minus expected vacancy losses.
If you’re using the NOI formula to calculate projected NOI for a property you’re considering buying, you should first find your Potential Rental Income (PRI), which is the total revenue you’ll generate assuming your property is fully occupied year-round and that your tenants don’t default in any rent payments.
Here is a list of the various types of income that should be included in your potential rental income:
Rents
Nonrefundable deposits (e.g., pet deposits)
Pet rent
Parking fees
Utilities
Any other payments you receive for the use or occupation of a property
Next, subtract vacancy loss—the amount of rental income you’d expect to lose when your property is vacant throughout the year. This can be done by estimating how many weeks or months of the year you’d expect to find your property vacant, then multiplying to determine how much income you’d lose at the rate you intend to rent the unit for.
Operating Expenses
The second half of the NOI formula is the sum of all your operating expenses. These are the non-variable, regular monthly expenses you expect to incur from a property, like insurance and property management fees.
The IRS defines “operating expenses” very strictly for tax deduction purposes. According to the IRS, operating expenses are:
Ordinary and necessary – Common expenditures that help your rental business in some way.
Current – It benefits your business for less than a year (e.g., a roof repair is not an operating expense because it lasts for more than a year).
Directly related to rental activity – It can’t be for your personal use.
Reasonable in amount—While there’s no set maximum amount, the expense should be reasonable for the type of expense it is.
Based on these criteria, operating expenses include:
Travel costs if you travel to your office/properties
Legal fees
HOA fees
Utilities you cover
The following expenses are not operating expenses:
Entertainment expenses
Government fines
Fees incurred from illegal activity
Lobbying or political contributions
Capital expenses (e.g., major renovations, construction of new dwelling units, etc.)
Real estate examination fees
Licensing fees
Federal income taxes
Certain interest payments
If you can’t get a close estimate for your operating expenses or simply want to speed up the calculation, a good rule of thumb is that operating expenses are around one third or 33% of your GOI.
Using the Formula
After you’ve found both your Gross Operating Income and your operating expenses, using the formula is easy: Simply multiply your monthly totals by 12 to get the annual counterparts, then subtract your yearly operating expenses from your GOI to find the Annual Net Operating Income for your property.
Using a NOI Calculator
If you don’t want or have time to do the math, another option is to use a NOI calculator. You might be evaluating hundreds of properties with only a few days to narrow down your search. When speed is the name of the game, an NOI calculator can save you hours of time.
Landlord Guru’s NOI calculator allows users to input their monthly rent, other income, insurance, utilities, and other costs and then outputs an approximate NOI.
From Calculating NOI to Interpreting It
After calculating NOI, what do you do with the result?
As is often the case in deal analysis, the result of your NOI calculation only makes sense in comparison to other properties you might be interested in buying. There’s no such thing as a “good” NOI, but only a good one for your particular business in a specific market compared to other investment options.
You can think of NOI as a broad, macro assessment of cash flow, or how much revenue you’ll pocket at the end of the day. It’s a general measure of your property’s return, or the amount of money you’ll make after paying all the expenses required to maintain the property itself.
Keep in mind that NOI is not a perfect metric. It is likely to overestimate your revenue, as there are bound to be unexpected costs like evictions or ones that vary considerably over the year, like repairs. NOI also excludes larger capital expenses that you’ll most certainly incur over time, such as roof repairs, kitchen renovations, or other large-scale projects. As assurance against these weaknesses, remember to use NOI in coordination with other metrics, such as ROI, capitalization rate, and gross rent multiplier. You should never make a real estate decision based on one metric or calculation in isolation.
NOI Example
In this section, let’s walk through a real-life example of how to calculate NOI for a property.
Let’s say you’re evaluating a duplex property in Cincinnati, Ohio. Let’s assume for this example that you plan to rent out both units and self-manage them with the help of free software to reduce management costs. Here are your estimated income and expenses for this property:
Income (per unit per month)
Expenses (per month)
Rent: $1,335
Parking fee: $15
Water, sewer, and trash: $35
Landlord insurance: $90
Property management: $0
Mortgage interest payments: $400
Cleaning and maintenance: $350
HOA fees: $200
Water and sewer: $85
Totaling the above, for two units over the course of a year, we get:
Income total (per year)
Expenses total (per year)
$33,240
$13,500
Now we can start working on the NOI calculation. Here’s our formula once again:
We’ll start with the first half of the formula, the gross operating income. Here’s how we calculate it using this duplex’s information, assuming an expected vacancy of approximately one month per year for each unit, or $2,770 in lost rent.
Your Net Operating Income (NOI) for this duplex would be approximately $16,970.
Conclusion
NOI is just one of many quick calculations real estate investors make all the time when analyzing a deal. You can use this formula to make accurate comparisons between any two properties you’re interested in, as long as you account for its shortcomings and consider multiple factors in your analyses.
