Rental Yield Methodology and Sources: How This Site Is Funded
Every source this site uses, every assumption it makes, what it refuses to publish, and who pays for it. Including the known weaknesses in its own headline figure.
On this page
How this site is funded
This site is published by a media business whose anchor partner operates in fractional rental ownership. Links to that partner are tracked, and the publisher is paid when a reader clicks one or signs up. The partner is not the publisher and has no editorial control over these pages.
Said plainly: this is a commercially funded site with a commercial interest in one route into property investment. You should read it accordingly. The only independence a site like this can honestly claim is that it applies the same arithmetic to its partner as to everyone else, publishes the arithmetic so you can check it, and states what it does not know. That is what the rest of this page is for.
Pages that mention the partner disclose the relationship before the content, not in a footnote.
Sources
Rents. Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), all home types, smoothed: City_zori_uc_sfrcondomfr_sm_month. A repeat-rent index of asking rents on Zillow listings, covering single-family, condo and multifamily.
Home values. Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), mid-tier (33rd-67th percentile), single-family and condo, smoothed and seasonally adjusted: City_zhvi_uc_sfrcondo_tier_0.33_0.67_sm_sa_month. An estimate of what a mid-tier home is worth, whether or not it is for sale.
Condo values. City_zhvi_uc_condo_tier_0.33_0.67_sm_sa_month, used only to state a condo price with a source — never as the denominator of a yield. See the warning below.
All three from Zillow Research, which publishes them as public CSVs.
Rental vacancy. Census Bureau, Housing Vacancy Survey, Table 4, rental vacancy rates for the 75 largest metropolitan areas. Quoted with margins of error, always, and not used as an assumption — see vacancy and rental yield.
Property tax mechanics. California Legislative Analyst's Office, Understanding California's Property Taxes, for the Proposition 13 acquisition-value rule, the 2% cap, the 1% rate and the components of a tax bill.
Statements about the partner. Only pages the partner itself publishes, retrieved first-hand, quoted, and listed with their URLs and retrieval dates in an internal facts sheet. A claim not in that sheet does not appear on the site.
The known weakness in the headline figure
This deserves its own heading because it is the biggest thing wrong with this site, and burying it would make the rest untrustworthy.
The city table divides ZORI by ZHVI. The two do not cover the same basket: ZORI includes multifamily, ZHVI's sfrcondo tier does not. So each figure is a market-level ratio of asking rent to mid-tier value, measured identically across cities — good for ranking cities, and not the gross yield of any particular property. It is worst in cities whose rental stock is mostly apartments and whose for-sale stock is mostly small condos; Emeryville is the clearest case.
ZORI is also an asking-rent index. In a rent-stabilised city a sitting tenant's rent can be far below it, and a buyer inherits the tenancy rather than the listing.
Full treatment, with the arithmetic of how wrong it can get: why published rental yields are wrong.
⚠️ The error this site refuses to make. There is no city-level condo-only rent series — Zillow publishes rent by home type at metro level only. So the natural way to answer "what does a condo yield in San Mateo?" is to take the all-home-types rent and divide it by the condo value. That gives 6.33% where the matched-basket answer is 2.84%. It is the single most common error in published fractional and city-level yield figures, and this site's data pipeline does not compute that number at all, so no page can quote it by accident.
Assumptions, named
Every net yield on this site subtracts these. They are assumptions, not measurements, and each page that uses them says so.
| Line | Assumption | Why, and how it could be wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Property tax | 1.1% of purchase price | The 1% rate is constitutional; the rest is voter-approved debt and varies by parcel. In a Mello-Roos district it can be 1.7%+. |
| Insurance | $2,200/year | An estimate. California's market has tightened sharply and a wildfire-exposed parcel can cost several times this. |
| Vacancy | 5% of annual rent | A convention, roughly one vacant month in twenty. Deliberately not the Census figure. One empty month is 8.33%. |
| Maintenance | 10% of annual rent | A convention. Older stock runs higher; an HOA that covers the envelope should reduce it. |
| Management | 8% of gross rent | The market norm. Self-managing removes it and costs time. |
| HOA | $0 unless stated | True for most detached houses, false for most condos, and the largest single swing factor. |
| Mortgage | 25% down, 7.0%, 30-year fixed | Illustrative. Rates move; the figure is stated so you can substitute. |
Substitute your own and the arithmetic still works — that is the point of showing it.
How figures reach these pages
No rent, price or yield figure on this site is typed into a page by hand. The dataset is rebuilt from the published CSVs by a script, and the pages contain tokens that are resolved from that dataset when the page is built. An unknown city or field stops the build rather than printing a blank.
Two consequences worth knowing. A refreshed dataset updates every page at once, so pages cannot disagree with each other. And the ratios are computed from the rounded figures the pages actually print — so if you multiply a printed rent by 12 and divide by the printed price, you get the printed percentage exactly. Computing from unrounded inputs would have made San Jose read 3.18% where 3,582 × 12 ÷ 1,353,869 is 3.17%, and a reader checking the arithmetic would have found the site wrong with no way to see why.
Each city carries its own most recent published month rather than a single site-wide date, because Zillow's trailing month is populated for large cities and empty for small ones: taking the last column would silently drop the small cities, and forcing a fixed month would mix vintages.
Current dataset: 92 cities, latest month September 2026, retrieved 2026-11-07.
What this site will not publish
- A figure from a source that could not be opened and read first-hand.
- A yield computed from mismatched rent and price baskets.
- A survey estimate quoted as a fact without its margin of error.
- A fee percentage, or a return net of fees, for any sponsor that does not publish one.
- A projected or historical return for a specific private offering.
- A claim that any fractional interest is liquid.
- A page without its own data. There is no template here and no per-city page generated by filling a form — which is deliberate, because mass-produced near-duplicate pages are both useless to a reader and a Google policy problem.
Corrections
Figures are regenerated from source rather than edited, so a stale number is fixed by refreshing the dataset. Where a claim of judgment turns out to be wrong — a ranking, a comparison, an interpretation — the page is corrected and the correction is described rather than silently overwritten.
This site is published for information only. It is not investment advice, not an offer to sell and not a recommendation to buy any security.