Rental yield is a comforting number. Read the other one.

When someone tells you a flat "yields six percent", they almost always mean gross yield: a full year of rent divided by the price you paid. It is a clean, quotable number, and brokers reach for it because it sounds like the return on a fixed deposit. It is comforting for exactly the reason it is misleading: it leaves out every single thing that makes actually owning and letting a flat expensive.

The number that ends up in your pocket is net yield, and the distance between gross and net is where the pleasant surprise curdles into an ordinary one. Nobody hides these costs from you, exactly. They just are not in the headline, and the headline is all most people ever run the sum on.

What the gross number quietly leaves out

• Maintenance and society charges, paid month after month whether the flat is let or empty.
• Property tax every year, plus the insurance you should be carrying.
• The months the flat sits empty between tenants, which silently erase a slice of that annual rent every single time it turns over.
• Repairs, a repaint between tenants, and the slow, certain replacement of the geyser, the taps, the paint and everything else that wears out.
• Brokerage, or your own time and effort, each time you have to find the next tenant.

The vacancy line is the one people forget hardest, because it does not arrive as a bill, it arrives as an absence. A flat empty for one month between tenants has already given up a twelfth of its year’s rent, and one slow turnover can quietly cost you more than a year of maintenance. Run the whole list through even conservatively, and a proud six percent gross can thin to something that no longer looks so different from leaving the money somewhere boring and liquid.

And yield is only half the return anyway

None of this is an argument against buying. It is an argument against buying on the strength of one flattering number. In much of Bangalore, the real return to owners over the years has come far more from the price of the flat rising than from the rent it threw off, so a place with a modest yield in an area that is genuinely on the move can beat a high-yield flat somewhere going nowhere. Yield and appreciation are two different bets, and the honest move is to look hard at both rather than let the easy number stand in for the difficult one.

That is the whole reason our investment reading looks past the rent at the things that actually drive appreciation: the infrastructure that is coming, the supply being built, the direction the area is genuinely heading, all read against the neighbourhood rather than the brochure. Weigh the yield, by all means. Just never let it be the only number in the room.

Gross yield is what a flat promises. Net yield, minus the empty months, is what it pays.