The Hawley Investor Deal Room
The deals are found.
The arithmetic is done.
Every income property on the market in Lee County goes through the same screen process overnight. What reaches you is the short list: buildings where the rent genuinely stands up against the price, with the figures already worked out. Nearly all of them fail that test and you never have to see them. No haystack, and no spreadsheet at eleven at night that ends in no.
Buying a home is a feeling. Buying an investment is arithmetic.
Walk into a house you might live in and you know within about nine seconds. None of that applies here, and none of it should. A duplex does not have to charm anybody. It has to collect more than it costs to own, every month, in a way you can prove before you sign.
The arithmetic was never the hard part. Finding the one property worth doing it on is. Several hundred income listings sit on the Lee County market at any time, most of them lose money from the day you close, and no photograph will tell you which. That is the work we took off your desk with our Investor Deal Room.
One percent, and very little clears it
A property reaches the board when its monthly rent is at least one percent of the asking price. Three hundred thousand dollars has to collect three thousand a month.
A building that cannot clear one percent rarely recovers once the tax bill resets and the insurance quote arrives. Everything that does clear the 1% rule then gets taken apart properly and analyzed. That's the part worth your attention.
The figures are measured, and we show them working.
The tax number on the listing belongs to the seller, and it dies with the sale
Florida reassesses when a property changes hands, and the county does not assess at the full price paid. Across 5,999 qualified single-parcel Lee County sales from 2025, matched to the following year's tax roll, the county assessed at about 82% of what was actually paid, and the share falls as the price rises. We apply that to the property's own taxing district millage, read off its 2026 TRIM notice. Ad valorem only. Garbage, lighting, drainage and any community development district assessment are billed separately, and we say so rather than quietly leaving them out of a monthly figure.
Rent is tested, not believed
Agents enter the income field annually and monthly both, and nothing in the feed says which. A Lehigh Acres duplex types sixty thousand a side and means the year. A Fort Myers property types three thousand seven hundred and means the month, which its two unit rents confirm to the dollar. Both readings get tested against closed leases and the card records which one we took.
Where a listing reports no income at all, rent is estimated from 7,316 Lee, Collier and Charlotte leases that closed in the twelve months to October 2026. Tested back against the leases it was built from, that estimate is out by 14% at the median. You will find that printed next to it, because a number without its error bar is worth very little to someone about to wire a deposit.
The unit count is checked rather than copied
The MLS unit field reported a single unit for two separate duplexes whose own remarks describe two. Another listing reports four and describes a triplex with a garage rented separately. We read the feed against the property type, the street numbers in the address and the agent's own remarks, and we keep every signal on the record.
What does not reach the board
A property is held back when the rent cannot be established, when the taxing district cannot be read, or when the unit count will not settle. Doubt withholds by default.
That rule costs us listings and it stays. If the feed says two units and the remarks describe six, smoothing the difference into a footnote would be worse than useless to you. It stays off until somebody establishes which is true. Where a property does go up with a contradiction still in it, the card carries the contradiction in words.
Four things happen at once
The rent, after everything
What reaches your account each month once the mortgage, the recalculated taxes, the insurance, the management, the vacancy allowance and the reserves are out of it.
Your tenant retires your loan
Every payment moves a slice of the balance out of the bank's column and into yours. The slice grows each year while you do nothing at all.
The building itself
Lee County has compounded at 4.53% a year over the thirty years to 2025, measured from the Federal Housing Finance Agency's All-Transactions House Price Index. The last three years ran at minus 1.24% a year and the last single year at minus 6.68%, and we print that beside it. The calculator opens at 4.53% and you change it to whatever you actually believe.
The widening gap
Rent moves with the market. A fixed mortgage does not, so the distance between the two opens a little further every year you hold the building.
A soft market is when the arithmetic favours a buyer. Rent does not fall with price at the same speed, so the same building returns more to whoever buys it now than it did to whoever bought it at the top.
What is waiting on the other side of the form
The board, with everything that cleared and the figures already laid out. A calculator you can push rather than read: change the deposit, the rate, the vacancy allowance, the management, the appreciation, and the whole thing recalculates in front of you. Your assumptions save against your own login and change nobody else's view of anything.
Mortgage rates come from the Optimal Blue lock indices and update every banking day, so the monthly figure is built on what lenders are actually writing this week rather than a number typed in once and forgotten.
Get access to the Investor Deal Room
Tell us where to send it. Martin rings you, works out what you are actually looking for, and turns the room on.
About the figures on the board. Everything shown in the Deal Room is an estimate built from the sources named beside it, and none of it is an appraisal, a loan estimate, an insurance quote or a guarantee of future performance. Rent estimates carry their measured error. Tax projections are ad valorem only and exclude non-ad-valorem assessments, which are read off the actual bill before an offer is written. Insurance figures are built from Florida Office of Insurance Regulation county averages and the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer. We are real estate agents and not insurance agents, lenders, accountants or attorneys, and nothing here is investment, tax or legal advice. Verify every figure independently before you commit money.
Past performance. The appreciation rate used in the calculator is a historical measurement for Lee County and not a forecast. Recent horizons are negative. Property can and does fall in value, tenants vacate, and a building that cash flows on paper can fail to in practice.
This is not a solicitation of property already listed with another broker.