Gross rent multiplier

Last updated

Gross rent multiplier (GRM) is the ratio of the price of a real estate investment to its annual rental income before accounting for expenses such as property taxes, insurance, and utilities; GRM is the number of years the property would take to pay for itself in gross received rent. For a prospective real estate investor, a lower GRM represents a better opportunity. [1]

The GRM is useful for comparing and selecting investment properties where depreciation effects, periodic costs (such as property taxes and insurance) and costs to the investor incurred by a potential renter (such as utilities and repairs) can be expected to be uniform across the properties (either as uniform values or uniform fractions of the gross rental income) or insignificant in comparison to gross rental income. As these costs are also often more difficult to predict than market rental return, the GRM serves as an alternative to a measure of net investment return where such a measure would be difficult to determine.

Example: $200,000 Sale Price / (750 per month rent * 12 months) = 22.22

Today, it is quite common for GRM to be quoted by real estate professionals using annual rents rather than monthly rents. A 100 GRM (monthly rents) = 8.33 GRM (annual rents). An 8.33 GRM calculated on annual rents suggests the gross rent will pay for the property in 8.33 years.

The common measure of rental real estate value based on net return rather than gross rental income is the capitalization rate (or cap rate). In contrast to the GRM, the cap rate is not a multiplier but a rate of annual return. A similar multiplier to the GRM derived from net return would be the multiplicative inverse of the cap rate. [2]

Relationship of the cap rate to the total return

Another way to value property is with the use of a multiple of gross potential rent, which is arrived at by observing multiples at comparable properties that have sold. This is done with the gross rent multiplier (GRM) or a gross income multiplier (GIM), which are essentially the same. When using these, it is important to know whether they were derived from multiples of gross potential rent or rather effective gross income. [3]

Procedures like the above are sometimes called "shortcut" procedures and they certainly have their place but as causal models of asset value they tend to be at best simplistic and at worst incomplete and sometimes misleading, compared to the more complete multiperiod discounted cash flow (DCF) procedure. For example, even though an example property's value of $18,325,000 may be expressed in terms of, a 5.46 percent cap rate, this does not imply that its value is caused simply by investors' wanting an initial income yield of 5.46 percent. Investors should care about a more complete multiperiod total return perspective on their future investment performance, as represented in the DCF procedure.

It is more accurate to think of the longer-term total return total perspective represented by DCF as causing the property value of $18,325,000. The cap rate of 5.46 percent is then best viewed as a reflective representation of the more fundamental DCF calculation.

Related Research Articles

Renting Agreement where a payment is made for the temporary use of a good, service or property owned by another

Renting, also known as hiring or letting, is an agreement where a payment is made for the temporary use of a good, service or property owned by another. A gross lease is when the tenant pays a flat rental amount and the landlord pays for all property charges regularly incurred by the ownership. An example of renting is equipment rental. Renting can be an example of the sharing economy.

A property tax or millage rate is an ad valorem tax on the value of a property.

Owner-occupancy or home-ownership is a form of housing tenure in which a person, called the owner-occupier, owner-occupant, or home owner, owns the home in which they live. The home can be a house, such as a single-family house, an apartment, condominium, or a housing cooperative. In addition to providing housing, owner-occupancy also functions as a real estate investment.

Yield (finance)

In finance, the yield on a security is a measure of the ex-ante return to a holder of the security. It is measure applied to common stocks, preferred stocks, convertible stocks and bonds, fixed income instruments, including bonds, including government bonds and corporate bonds, notes and annuities.

Negative gearing is a form of financial leverage whereby an investor borrows money to acquire an income-producing investment and the gross income generated by the investment is less than the cost of owning and managing the investment, including depreciation and interest charged on the loan. The investor may enter into a negatively geared investment expecting tax benefits or the capital gain on the investment after it is sold to exceed the accumulated losses of holding the investment. The investor would take into account the tax treatment of negative gearing, which may generate additional benefits to the investor in the form of tax benefits if the loss on a negatively geared investment is tax-deductible against the investor's other taxable income and if the capital gain on the sale is given a favourable tax treatment.

Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of developing an opinion of value for real property. Real estate transactions often require appraisals because they occur infrequently and every property is unique, unlike corporate stocks, which are traded daily and are identical. The location also plays a key role in valuation. However, since property cannot change location, it is often the upgrades or improvements to the home that can change its value. Appraisal reports form the basis for mortgage loans, settling estates and divorces, taxation, and so on. Sometimes an appraisal report is used to establish a sale price for a property.

A real-estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real-estate markets, and typically follow a land boom. A land boom is the rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline. This period, during the run up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.

Buy-to-let is a British phrase referring to the purchase of a property specifically to let out, that is to rent it out. A buy-to-let mortgage is a mortgage loan specifically designed for this purpose. Buy-to-let properties are usually residential but the term also encompasses student property investments and hotel room investments.

Operating surplus is an accounting concept used in national accounts statistics and in corporate and government accounts. It is the balancing item of the Generation of Income Account in the UNSNA. It may be used in macro-economics as a proxy for total pre-tax profit income, although entrepreneurial income may provide a better measure of business profits. According to the 2008 SNA, it is the measure of the surplus accruing from production before deducting property income, e.g., land rent and interest.

Capitalization rate is a real estate valuation measure used to compare different real estate investments. Although there are many variations, the cap rate is generally calculated as the ratio between the annual rental income produced by a real estate asset to its current market value. Most variations depended on the definition of the annual rental income and whether it is gross or net of annual costs, and whether the annual rental income is the actual amount received, or the potential rental income that could be received if the asset was optimally rented.

Real estate investing involves the purchase, ownership, management, rental and/or sale of real estate for profit. Improvement of realty property as part of a real estate investment strategy is generally considered to be a sub-specialty of real estate investing called real estate development. Real estate is an asset form with limited liquidity relative to other investments. It is also capital intensive and is highly cash flow dependent. If these factors are not well understood and managed by the investor, real estate becomes a risky investment.

Leaseback, short for "sale-and-leaseback", is a financial transaction in which one sells an asset and leases it back for the long term; therefore, one continues to be able to use the asset but no longer owns it. The transaction is generally done for fixed assets, notably real estate, as well as for durable and capital goods such as airplanes and trains. The concept can also be applied by national governments to territorial assets; prior to the Falklands War, the government of the United Kingdom proposed a leaseback arrangement whereby the Falklands Islands would be transferred to Argentina, with a 99-year leaseback period, and a similar arrangement, also for 99 years, had been in place prior to the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China. Leaseback arrangements are usually employed because they confer financing, accounting or taxation benefits.

Rental value is the fair market value of property while rented out in a lease. More generally, it may be the consideration paid under the lease for the right to occupy, or the royalties or return received by a lessor (landlord) under a license to real property. In the science and art of appraisal, it is the amount that would be paid for rental of similar real property in the same condition and in the same area.

The income approach is one of three major groups of methodologies, called valuation approaches, used by appraisers. It is particularly common in commercial real estate appraisal and in business appraisal. The fundamental math is similar to the methods used for financial valuation, securities analysis, or bond pricing. However, there are some significant and important modifications when used in real estate or business valuation.

The German income approach is the standard approach used in Germany for the valuing of property that produces a stream of future cash flows.

Return on investment (ROI) or return on costs (ROC) is a ratio between net income and investment. A high ROI means the investment's gains compare favourably to its cost. As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiencies of several different investments. In economic terms, it is one way of relating profits to capital invested.

An investment rating of a real estate property measures the property’s risk-adjusted returns, relative to a completely risk-free asset. Mathematically, a property’s investment rating is the return a risk-free asset would have to yield to be termed as good an investment as the property whose rating is being calculated. The underlying drivers for property ratings are the dividends and capital gains over a certain holding period, and their associated risks or variances. Similar to other financial ratings developed for mutual funds and stocks, it can be assumed that investors have constant relative risk aversion over the wealth derived from other sources and from their investments. For simplicity, it can also be assumed that the investment return is not correlated with other sources of wealth but represents 100% of the investor's wealth. A property’s investment rating is then a transformation of the risk-adjusted averaged return to a single number that conveys the property’s long-term potential to yield profits.

Real estate benchmarking is the standard of measurement used to analyze the financial characteristics of a real estate investment property. In the general sense, real estate benchmarking refers to the comparison of potential real estate investment properties against a predetermined framework of measurement. In a narrow sense, the term real estate benchmarking refers to the specific real estate indicators used to measure the real estate properties.

Property investment calculator is a term used to define an application that provides fundamental financial analysis underpinning the purchase, ownership, management, rental and/or sale of real estate for profit. Property investment calculators are typically driven by mathematical finance models and converted into source code. Key concepts that drive property investment calculators include returns, cash flow, affordability of financing, investment strategy, equity and risk management.

In United States real estate business, normally the landlord, rather than the tenant, is responsible for real estate taxes, maintenance, and insurance. In a "net lease" the tenant or lessee is responsible for paying, in addition to base rent, some or all of the recoverable expenses related to real-estate ownership. As the rent collected under a net lease is net of expenses, the base rent tends to be lower than rent charged under a gross lease.

References

  1. ↑ "Understanding the Gross Rent Multiplier in Commercial Real Estate". Propertymetrics.com. Retrieved 2016-09-13.
  2. ↑ "Small Residential Income Property Appraisal Report" (PDF). Fanniemae.com. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  3. ↑ "Market Value of Investment Real estate". apartmentpropertyvaluation.com. Retrieved 15 September 2019.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.