How to Calculate the Return on a Rental Property in Venezuela
How to work out the return on a rental property in Venezuela, with a worked example built on real asking prices and the costs that separate gross from net.
Is renting out property in Venezuela worth it?
It depends what you buy and what you pay for it, and that can be estimated. There are 426 apartments listed for rent and 1,446 listed for sale on Propiedash today with a public price and floor area.
Comparing units of similar size, between 80 and 180 m², the band where most transactions actually happen, the national median rent is $1,450 a month against a median asking price of $135,000. That implies a gross yield of 12.9% a year in USD. In Caracas: $1,800 a month against $180,000, or 12.0%.
Hold on to two things before using those figures. This is a yield implied between asking prices: it is computed from the median of one set of rental listings and the median of a different set of sale listings, not from properties that actually rented or from closed transactions. And it is gross: as you will see below, costs take two to four points off it.
The Basic Formula
Gross ROI (%) = (Annual rental income / Purchase price) × 100
Easy to write and easy to misapply. The error is almost never in the formula, it is in the two numbers you put into it.
A worked example with real figures
Las Mercedes is the zone where we hold enough comparable inventory on both sides to run this honestly. For apartments of 80 to 180 m²:
Note that the median areas on both sides nearly match, 119 and 117 m². That is what makes the division mean something.
From gross to net
Gross is not what you keep. The assumptions below are planning figures, not measurements of ours, and you should replace them with the numbers for the specific building you are evaluating:
On those assumptions net income falls to $32,644 and net ROI to 7.8%. That is 2.2 points below gross, and it is the margin many people never deduct.
One warning about condominium fees. Among the listings that disclose the fee, the median is $50 a month and the 90th percentile reaches $128, but only 92 of 1,865 active apartments disclose it at all. That is a small, self-selected sample, so treat it as weak guidance and ask for the actual fee in writing. In a building with its own generator and well the fee runs considerably higher, and those are precisely the buildings that rent better and faster.
Why we do not publish a yield table by zone
It would be the most useful content in this article and we are not going to publish it, because the data does not support it yet. It is worth explaining why, because the same reasoning will help you distrust the tables you will find elsewhere.
A yield by zone needs two medians for the same kind of unit: what is asked to buy and what is asked to rent, for apartments of comparable size. When size is not controlled, you get numbers that look publishable and are not. A real example, Los Palos Grandes:
Dividing one median by the other gives a reasonable-sounding 7.9% that means nothing: it compares the rent of 96 m² apartments against the asking price of 400 m² apartments. They are two different products. And if we require the comparable 80 to 180 m² band, Los Palos Grandes is left with 3 sale listings and 4 rentals, far too few to publish a median.
Applying that filter across Caracas, only two zones retain enough inventory on both sides:
| Zone | Sale listings | Rental listings | Median asking price | Median rent | Gross ROI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las Mercedes | 19 | 13 | $419,650 | $3,500 | 10.0% |
| Campo Alegre | 11 | 30 | $370,000 | $2,500 | 8.1% |
Two zones, on 11 and 19 sale listings. We publish both with their n visible so you can judge, and we do not extend them into a five or ten zone table by filling the gaps with estimates. When rental inventory grows enough, we will publish the full table.
In the meantime the right procedure is the one that works for valuation too: instead of looking for your zone's figure, look for your comparables. Filter by zone and by floor area, look at the five or six rental listings that genuinely resemble the apartment you are evaluating, and compare them against the sale listings at that same size.
Tenant Types and Demand
Professionals and executives: looking for two to three bedroom apartments in safe, well-connected areas. They pay a premium for buildings with a generator.
Companies and embassies: they want high-end furnished properties, on long contracts with reliable payment. This is the segment that explains the highest rents per square metre in Las Mercedes and La Castellana.
Returning Venezuelans: arriving from abroad, they look for temporary properties while they resettle.
Conclusion
The numbers in this article say that gross yields in Caracas run around 12% for mid-sized apartments, that one concrete, properly measured case came out at 10.0% gross and 7.8% net, and that at zone level there is not yet data for more precision than that.
What does not change is the method: control for size before comparing, deduct costs before celebrating, and verify the documentation before the price. Our rental guide covers the contract and the landlord's obligations, and what apartments ask per square metre in Caracas has the detail on asking prices by zone.
About the data: figures come from active apartment listings published on Propiedash as of 26 August 2026: 1,446 sale listings and 426 rental listings nationally, of which 980 and 336 respectively are in Caracas. Rent is the published monthly price. Listings without a public price or floor area are excluded, as are cases outside $100 to $15,000 per m² for sales or $1 to $60 per m² a month for rentals, which are data-entry errors. Yields are computed as (median rent × 12) / median asking price, with both medians taken over the same zone and the same size band; they are yields implied between asking prices, not realised returns, and they exclude costs. We hold no data on closed transactions or signed contracts. The listing counts are a headcount at the instant the snapshot was taken and shift from one day to the next; the medians are far more stable. Treat these figures as a snapshot of August 2026.
Propiedash
Propiedash Team