Dubuque County

Dubuque County's headline numbers tell a clear story before you run a single pro forma. At a rent-to-price ratio of 4.60% and a cap rate of 2.99%, this market sits firmly on the appreciation end of the spectrum. Median home prices of $277,182 paired with median rents of $1,063 produce a gross yield that simply cannot support conventional financing at today's rates. The model underwrite confirms it: a 20% down payment at 6.85% generates a monthly mortgage of $1,453 against an estimated gross rent of $1,063, resulting in negative $762 per month in cash flow and a cash-on-cash return of -14.34%. That number is not a rounding error, it is the arithmetic consequence of buying a mid-$200K asset in a sub-$1,100 rent market with current debt costs. The one thing working in the county's favor on the price side is a 4.27% year-over-year home price appreciation rate, which is real but not enough on its own to rescue leveraged cash flow.

Given those figures, Dubuque is a market for the appreciation buyer or the patient long-term hold investor, not the cash-flow buyer. If your strategy requires a property to carry itself from month one, the numbers here do not support it at standard leverage. The affordability index of 71 and the overall score of 59 (ranking 402nd out of 1,000 counties nationally, 88th out of 99 Iowa counties) place Dubuque in the middle of the pack nationally but near the bottom of Iowa's own ranking, which mostly reflects how the cash-flow score of 39 drags down what would otherwise be a competitive appreciation score of 84. An investor who can absorb a monthly subsidy, or who is buying with significant cash to reduce debt service, and who believes the 4.27% annual appreciation trend persists, has a coherent thesis here. A value-add operator might also find room to compress the gap by forcing rents above the $1,063 median through renovation, but the underlying price-to-rent relationship still means the margin for error is thin.

The county seat and its broader economic base matter here. Dubuque sits on the Mississippi River and historically functions as a regional hub for eastern Iowa and the tri-state area where Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois converge. That geographic position tends to support more stable rental demand than a purely agricultural county would, since the population of roughly 99,000 reflects a denser urban core with attached service, healthcare, and light-industrial employment rather than farm-dependent income alone. That regional-hub dynamic is worth considering when stress-testing vacancy assumptions, even though specific employer concentration data is not available in this dataset.

The tax and insurance picture is a genuine underwriting consideration. At Iowa's state-average effective property tax rate of 1.53%, the annual tax bill on a $277,182 purchase runs approximately $4,241, and insurance adds another $942 per year, putting combined monthly tax and insurance at $432. That $432 line item alone is meaningful on a property collecting $1,063 in rent, representing roughly 41% of gross rent before mortgage principal, interest, maintenance, or management fees are accounted for. Iowa's 1.53% state-average rate is high enough to deserve its own line on your underwrite, and you should confirm the county and township rate for any specific parcel, since actual assessments can diverge meaningfully from the state average. The taxInsurance note in the data confirms this is a Tax Foundation 2024 state-average estimate, not a parcel-level figure. Do not assume it in either direction until you have the actual tax bill.

The most pointed risk here is the structural cash-flow deficit at current interest rates. This is not a temporary yield compression that a rate buydown solves, it reflects a rent level that has not kept pace with home price appreciation relative to debt costs. If interest rates decline materially, the math improves, but that is a macro bet rather than a market underwrite. The appreciation score of 84 suggests prices have momentum, but appreciation benefits are unrealized until a sale, meaning the investor carries the monthly negative while waiting. Concentration risk is also worth flagging in the sense that Dubuque is a single mid-size city, and a meaningful employer departure or regional economic contraction would hit both rents and prices simultaneously given the limited geographic diversification.

Against the neighboring counties in the dataset, Dubuque compares as a higher-price, moderate-yield market. Polk County, which is Des Moines, is the closest comparable by price ($274,734 median) but posts a meaningfully better rent-to-price ratio of 5.28% versus Dubuque's 4.60%, with a median rent of $1,209 against Dubuque's $1,063, and edges Dubuque on overall score, 60 to 59. For a buy-and-hold investor choosing between these two at similar price points, Polk County's additional $146 per month in median rent and superior gross yield make it the stronger cash-flow candidate. Bremer County comes in at a lower price point ($249,927) but with a rent-to-price ratio of only 3.36% and median rent of $700, making it an even worse cash-flow proposition despite the lower price. Marion County sits just below Dubuque in both price ($272,985) and rent ($1,013), with a similar rent-to-price ratio of 4.45% and a slightly lower overall score of 57, so there is no compelling reason to prefer it. Appanoose and Van Buren counties are priced well below Dubuque, at $111,484 and $169,150 respectively, which opens the door to lower debt service, but without rent data for either it is impossible to model yield. Choose Dubuque over its neighbors if you are specifically targeting Mississippi River corridor appreciation dynamics and can tolerate the carry cost; if cash flow is the primary objective, Polk County's Des Moines market delivers better yield at nearly the same price.