Tooele County

Tooele County's headline numbers tell a straightforward story: a median home price of $475,828 paired with median rent of $1,740.81 produces a gross rent-to-price ratio of 4.39%, and the modeled cap rate comes in at 2.85%. Neither figure signals a cash-flow market. Running the standard buy-and-hold scenario at 6.85% on a 20% down purchase, the monthly mortgage alone is $2,494. Add $609 in estimated operating expenses and you're staring at negative $1,363 per month in cash flow and a cash-on-cash return of negative 14.95%. The overall investment score of 42 out of 100, placing Tooele at the 7th national percentile across 1,000 counties, reflects exactly that math. On the cash-flow vs. appreciation spectrum, Tooele leans appreciation, but weakly: its appreciation score is only 48, and home prices are actually down 0.33% year-over-year, so even the appreciation thesis requires patience rather than recent momentum. Affordability is constrained at an index of 32, which matters because it compresses the renter pool who can absorb meaningful rent growth.

The investor profile this market fits is narrow. A pure cash-flow buyer should stop here and look elsewhere; the numbers don't close at any conventional leverage level near current rates. An appreciation buyer can make a thesis around Tooele's proximity to Salt Lake City and its role as a relative value option within the Wasatch Front, but the negative YoY price movement means you'd be catching a dip rather than riding a trend, and the stability score of 50 doesn't provide a lot of cushion. The most plausible operator in Tooele is someone already operating at scale in the Salt Lake metro who wants geographic diversification at a lower price point than Salt Lake County ($558,754 median), with a long hold horizon and the cash reserves to carry negative monthly cash flow while waiting for either rate relief or rent appreciation to close the gap. Value-add operators who can meaningfully push rents above the $1,740 median have the clearest path to a workable return here, but even that is constrained by the affordability index of 32, which caps how far rents can realistically move.

No economic anchors or employer data were provided for Tooele County specifically, so no claims about job concentration or institutional demand drivers can be made from this dataset. That absence is itself worth noting in your underwrite: without visibility into the local employment base, rental demand assumptions are harder to stress-test, and you'd want to do that legwork independently before committing capital.

On carry costs, Tooele actually gets a tailwind from property taxes. Utah's state-average effective rate is 0.63%, flagged here as low, producing an estimated annual tax bill of $2,998 and annual insurance of $904, for a combined monthly tax-and-insurance load of $325. That is a genuine positive relative to high-tax states where the same asset might carry $700 to $900 per month in tax and insurance alone. Worth noting, however, that this is a state-average estimate from Tax Foundation 2024 data, and your actual county or township rate may differ, so verify the specific parcel before finalizing your underwrite. Even so, the low tax environment is one of the few structural cost advantages Tooele offers, and it shows up meaningfully in the expense stack.

The risks worth flagging are concentration and demographic scale. Tooele County has a population of 74,032, which is a thin renter pool in absolute terms. A market that size has limited absorption capacity if vacancy ticks up, and there is no vacancy data provided here to know current occupancy conditions. The affordability index of 32 also suggests the existing renter base is already stretched, which limits rent escalation and increases credit risk at the tenant level. Regulatory risk data is not provided, so no conclusions can be drawn there, but Utah has generally been landlord-friendly at the state level.

Against its neighbors, Tooele holds a modest edge on price-to-rent relative to Salt Lake County (rent-to-price 3.45%) and Summit County (3.33%), both of which are materially worse for income investors. Washington County matches Tooele almost exactly at a 4.34% rent-to-price ratio with a slightly higher median rent of $1,890 but a higher median price of $522,143 and an overall score of 41, one point lower. Cache County is the most interesting comparison: median price of $454,811 (lower than Tooele), rent-to-price of 3.95% (lower), and an overall score of 48 (higher). The score divergence suggests Cache County scores better on dimensions not captured purely in rent-to-price, and an investor weighing these two markets should examine what's driving that 6-point overall score gap before defaulting to Tooele on price alone. Choose Tooele over its neighbors primarily if you have a specific geographic thesis tied to Salt Lake metro spillover demand and you can source a property below median at a price point where the carry math becomes less punishing.