About RealHomeCost.net

Most mortgage calculators show you a principal-and-interest number and call it a day. But that number can be off by hundreds of dollars a month — because it leaves out the costs that actually vary by where you live: property taxes, homeowners insurance, and whether your loan falls under FHA or conforming limits.

Property tax rates range from under 0.5% in Hawaii to over 2.2% in parts of Texas and Illinois. Homeowners insurance averages $700 a year in Nevada and over $4,800 a year in Florida. Ignoring those numbers doesn't make them disappear — it just means buyers get surprised at closing, or worse, buy more house than they can actually afford.

RealHomeCost was built to fix that. Every calculator on this site pulls real county-level effective tax rates, state insurance averages, and the latest FHFA and FHA loan limits so you can see the full PITI picture — not just the easy part.

Louis Rodriguez is a developer who built RealHomeCost.net after getting tired of guessing what housing actually costs. He went looking for a tool that combined real local data — property taxes, insurance, loan limits — in one place and couldn't find one that wasn't either paywalled, outdated, or buried in a lender's lead-gen flow. So he built it himself.

The site is owned and operated by Build in Silence LLC. There are no lender partnerships, no sponsored results, and no hidden fees. Revenue comes from display advertising only, which is disclosed on every page.