If you rented out your home, how much could you reasonably expect to collect in monthly rent?
While the answer to that question will ultimately come down to the biggest single driver of both rent and home prices in real estate, "location, location, location", we can give you a ballpark estimate of how much money renting out your house might bring in each month using historic data published in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual Consumer Expenditure Survey.
The following chart shows the average amount of monthly rent that surveyed American homeowners estimate they might earn if they owned an average home in the U.S. in each year from 1984 through 2018.
We ran a simple regression analysis of the historic data, where the math formula indicated on the chart above will provide a ballpark estimate of what average monthly rent might be collected by an owner renting out their average valued home. And here at Political Calculations, where there's math, a tool isn't far behind! If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click through to our site to access a working version of the tool.
Since the tool is based on the average value of owned U.S. homes and average estimated monthly rents from renting out those homes in the years from 1984 through 2018, the further you get from the average trend line, say during a housing bubble or when rents are too damn high, to coin a phrase, the less accurate the tool's estimate will be. Likewise, the same holds the further outside the period of 1984 through 2018 we are for the average home values you might enter.
Reference
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Multiyear Tables. [PDF Documents: 1984-1991, 1992-1999, 2000-2005, 2006-2012, 2013-2018]. Reference URL: http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxmulti.htm. Accessed 10 September 2019.