A generation of buyers learned to size debt as a percentage of price. That habit made sense when rates were low enough that leverage hit its loan-to-value ceiling before it hit its coverage ceiling. At 2026 rates, the order has flipped on most income deals: the debt service coverage test binds first, the LTV number on the term sheet is decorative, and buyers who still think in LTV keep discovering the gap at the worst possible moment, between accepted offer and loan commitment.
The mechanics deserve one plain paragraph. The lender runs two ceilings and lends to the lower one. The LTV ceiling is price times maximum leverage. The coverage ceiling works backward from income: your NOI, divided by the minimum coverage ratio, is the debt service the lender will tolerate; the loan that debt service supports at today's rate and amortization is the coverage-constrained maximum. When rates rise, that second number falls while the first stands still, which is the entire story of the current financing market in one sentence.
The practical consequence is the proceeds gap. A buyer underwrites seventy percent leverage, the coverage math delivers sixty, and the missing ten points of the capital stack become an equity call nobody budgeted, weeks after the deal was priced. The deal has not changed. The buyer's understanding of it has, late, in front of counterparties.
Run your deal through the widget below and look at which constraint binds. Then use the result the way strong operators actually use it: backward. If coverage caps the loan, then the loan caps the price you can pay at your required equity and return, which means debt sizing belongs at the offer stage, not the financing stage. An offer built on the debt the deal genuinely supports is an offer that survives committee. This is also, quietly, a negotiation position: a buyer who can show a seller why the price is the price, in the lender's own arithmetic, is harder to argue with than one quoting comps.
What the napkin version cannot see is that NOI is not one number. It moves year by year with rollovers, escalations, and lease structure, and a loan sized comfortably against year one can be tight against year three if two leases roll badly, which is how covenant conversations start. Sizing against a single NOI is a snapshot of a moving object.
That is where this page hands off. PropCalc™ carries the full debt structure through every month of the hold against the lease-level cash flows, so coverage is a curve you can inspect rather than a number you hope holds. The widget below tells you what the loan looks like today. The model tells you whether it still looks that way in year four.