What the phrase points to
Most conversations about property money split it into two parts. One is what the property brings in while it is held, usually rent. The other is what is left when it is sold, once what was paid for it and the costs of owning it are taken off. Real estate profits is the phrase people use for the two together.
The word profit does the work here. It is not the same as a property going up in value, and not the same as the rent collected over a year. It is what remains after the money spent along the way is accounted for. Because that spending differs from owner to owner, two people can hold the same property and describe the profit very differently.
How people usually work it out
When people sit down to work out what a property has earned them, they tend to start with everything that came in and then subtract everything that went out. What came in is usually rent and, later, the amount it sells for. What went out includes what was paid for it at the start, the interest on any borrowing, repairs and upkeep, insurance, rates, and the fees paid to agents and conveyancers.
The order matters less than the habit of keeping the two lists apart. Money that arrives before costs are taken off is usually called gross, and what is left afterwards is usually called net. People who talk about property returns often say which of the two they mean, because the gap between them can be wide.
What people weigh when they look at a property
Talk about profit in property usually turns into talk about time. A property kept for a short while may show little beyond what the rent brings in. Over a longer period, the change in its value plays a larger part. Neither of those is fixed, and people who look closely tend to treat any single year as a poor guide on its own.
Costs are the other half of the picture. Upkeep, insurance, rates and the fees charged at purchase and at sale all come off whatever the property earns. Some of these arrive regularly and some only once, which is why people often list them separately rather than folding them into one figure.
Words that come up alongside it
A few terms appear again and again in these conversations. Yield usually means the income a property produces in a year set against what it cost. Cash flow is the money actually moving in and out over a period. Capital growth describes a change in the value of the property itself rather than the income from it. Return on investment is the broadest of the four and is used for the whole result, income and value change together.
None of these words mean quite the same thing, and people mix them up often. When someone asks how a property is doing, the answer usually starts with which of them the person has in mind.