Cash-On-Cash Return

  

Categories: Metrics, Investing

Imagine if Johnny Cash narrated a film in which he reflected on his life. Cash on Cash would be a good title. But imagine if he came back from the dead to tell America a few things he left out of the first film. Cash on Cash Return would make for a proper sequel title.

Too bad that real estate experts have already claimed “Cash on Cash Return” for themselves. This ratio represents a practical way to measure return on investment in prospective real estate projects. In the hyper-sexy world of building and house slinging, investors take initial cash flow and divide it by the equity invested at the end of a specific period. The quotient is the Cash on Cash Return.

Example:

Let’s imagine a commercial property will produce a before-tax cash flow of $100,000 by the year 2022. Then let’s say that the people who want to own the building will have injected about $1 million in the project by the end of that year.

We’ll divide the pre-tax cash flow of $100,000 into the $1 million of equity invested. This will give us a cash-on-cash return of 10% for the year 2022.

It’s not as entertaining as listening to Johnny Cash talk about his drug-addled years, but at least you can now decide if a real estate property surpasses an expected minimum annual return you’d acquire when examining real estate opportunities.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: How Do You Calculate Rates of R...35 Views

00:00

finance - a la shmoop how do you calculate rates of return? well invest a dollar get

00:08

more than a dollar back right? well yeah you hope so anyway in in finance land [dollar bill on table]

00:13

and Wall Street and any other professional gig. well rates of return

00:17

from financial investments are generally stated as annual returns, so calculating

00:23

a rate of return revolves around the one year at a time thing. there are a ton of

00:29

curveballs that get thrown into these calculations. here's a big one,

00:33

dividends. well guess what clueless financial journalists with little to no [dividends defined]

00:37

real schooling in finance quote stock market returns all the time. let's say

00:41

that shares in random example industries traded at the same price at the

00:46

beginning of the 1970s as they did at the end of the decade. prices for random

00:51

example industries were totally flat from 1970 to 1980. that's what one of

00:56

those journalists might say. and they don't even get fired for making such a [man reports news]

00:59

narrow statement .no nothing happened at all. and wrong. had they taken this course

01:04

they'd have realized that monster-sized dividends were paid out during that time

01:09

period. five six seven eight percent a year, each year. yet the journalists

01:14

ignored them when they stated that the stock market was in fact flat for a

01:18

decade and maybe shares of that company were also flat for a decade. but it

01:22

implied that they got no return from their investment which is absolutely [icons of stock market and a stock deflate]

01:26

wrong. did readers get their money back for that bad journalistic work? yeah we

01:30

doubt it - well what about zero coupon bonds? that is their bonds that pay no

01:35

dividends or interest along the way and they sell at a discount to par. what does

01:40

that mean? that is $1,000 par value bond pays you a grand in seven years. well how

01:47

do you calculate the annualized rates of return there? well today that bond sells

01:51

for six hundred forty two dollars. like you buy it today for six hundred forty

01:56

two you get a thousand bucks in seven years. well what's the rate of return on [zero coupon bond rates of return listed]

02:00

that bond? hmm. well vanilla bonds like these we're a whole lot easier to

02:04

calculate. because like you got the interest rate right there on the thingy.

02:07

yeah so the question is really what interest rate will accrue and then

02:12

compound for this bond such that in exactly seven years you get a thousand

02:17

bucks? well if it compounded at ten percent a year the compounding would

02:20

look like this. you see the table right there and whoa we've already passed the

02:25

grand way ahead of seven years. so the compound rate must be less than ten

02:28

percent right well what if it compounded at five percent a year well then the [compound rate listed]

02:32

rates of return would look like this and basically we're just multiplying 1.0

02:36

five times a 6.2 and we take that compound totally multiply 1.05 again and

02:41

so on and so on. much closer .well here's the formula you'll want to remember.

02:45

where f is the face value PV is the present value and n is the number of

02:53

periods. well in our example the face values a thousand bucks, the present

02:58

value is 642 dollars and the number of periods is the number of years or seven

03:05

years. all right well then we just you know put our handy-dandy calculator to [mathematical formula shown]

03:08

work and get a yield of well right around here. so here's the key idea rates

03:14

of return are an annual thing when quoted among finance professionals. among

03:20

fun dance professionals well and maybe a different story. [three stooges pictured]

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