Rental property analysis via spreadsheets, tools, calculators, formulas, softwares and apps can help you to determine the significance of investment. Bringing you a list of softwares that are tried and highly recommended by me on a personal level. I have used all the list of property investment apps and software mentioned below. If you come across any new softwares similar to these and found it useful, feel free to let me know. I would be pleased to add them to this list of recommendations.
Quick Links:
Analytics & Market Research
House Canary
https://www.housecanary.com/solutions/real-estate-investor/
Explore and source potential properties with analytics and data pulled directly from MLS. Set your criteria for automated qualified leads with this investment software. Includes “rental explorer” valuation tool.
- Nothing is on their website about pricing. This site says they change $10 per comparative market analysis (CMA): https://hooquest.com
AirDNA
https://www.airdna.co/vacation-rental-data
Says it will help you find the best places to invest in vacation rentals (short term rentals), using interactive maps and over 25 key performance metrics in over 80,000 cities worldwide. Data-driven dynamic pricing strategies. View pricing trajectories.
- $19.95 – $99.95 mo. depending upon the size of the market you want to research. Assuming you are researching a market with more than 1,000 listings, you will need the $99.95 mo. plan with this property investment app.
Vrolio
Free to join their community, but they only provide regional listings for the 8 cities they represent. Vrolio offers a full suite of tools, investment information, and data analytics on short-term rental properties. Our goal is to offer short-term rental investors a single place to buy and sell investment properties. This is listed among the most prominent real estate property investor tools that can help you to make a significant investment.
Real Estate Analysis Software & Calculators
Some of these rental property accounting tools are great and many are free (or cheap), but most people can use spreadsheets for the same purpose. Of course, these don’t sync with your personal finances, traditional investment portfolio or anything else, so you have no idea where each scenario leaves you financially.
Bigger Pockets
https://www.biggerpockets.com/rental-property-calculator
- Basic, easy to use calculators on this site get most everything. Very little accuracy in creating a long-term maintenance plan, but still easy to use and effective.
Provides long term projections but with so-so amounts of data detail (if I remember)
Free, but you can’t save anything. To save the data or export a PDF you need to pay $19 mo. for a Plus Membership (limited to 5 reports) or a Pro Membership $39 mo. so you can have unlimited calculator access.
Deal Check
- Structured to analyze deals with the metrics most commonly used for short term rentals, long term rentals, flips & rehab, BRRRR, wholesale, multi-family and commercial buildings: CoC, NOI, Cap Rate, etc.
- This is one of the few (only?) real estate investment calculators that provide some long term planning info so you can see your total cash flow and net worth over time. Goes out 35 years. Obviously not meant to be financial planning software so it doesn’t aggregate this into your personal finances over the long haul, but seems to be good at what it does.
- Workflow includes the ability to:
- Import property data from public records.
- Customize precise deal parameters.
- View detailed financial analysis and projections.
- Look up recent sales and rental comps.
- Calculate your highest offer price to seller.
- Provides standard metrics like
- $7 mo. plan limits 50 saved properties, 15 photos and 10 comps. $15 mo. is unlimited with property owner lookup and custom branding.
Rental Software
https://www.rentalsoftware.com/
Geared more toward real estate agents that want to sell to real estate investors
- Not designed for short term rentals. Designed for long term rental and flips.
- Creates PDF reports
- Not a monthly fee. $99.95 download for long term rental Cash Flow Analyzer Pro or $129.95 download with IRA module (tax advantage analysis for putting real estate into IRA, Roth & 401K)
- $99.95 for Flipper Cash Flow Analyzer
Valuate
- Multi-family core and value-add underwriting model from the rent roll through unit renovations, refi and sale. Seems this might be more for commercial.
- Pricing is free, $19 and $49 mo. depending upon feature set
Real Data
https://www.realdata.com/p/express/
- Detailed and quick analysis for short term rentals. Only a quick analysis for short term rentals.
- Says this is software but requires Microsoft Excel (only exports reports?)
- $85 for 30 days, then $495 for unlimited use.
- Property comparison module is $39
Calculator.net
https://www.calculator.net/rental-property-calculator.html
Free, very down and dirty calculator that lacks a lot of detailed breakdowns, but captures the big picture. You can find out quickly however if something warrants further exploration using metrics such as:
- 50% rule
- 1% rule
- Internal Return Rate
- Capitalization Rate
- Cash on Cash Return
CRE Models
This one seems to be a bit more for commercial investing.
Real Estate Analysis Spreadsheets
Here are a bunch of links to rental property analysis spreadsheets that help assess various property metrics for purchase. We have not tested these, but some of them are pretty popular:
Real Estate Financial Planner
TSN Financial Models
Real Estate Spreadsheets
The Kick Ass Entrepreneur
Rental Property Accounting
I have left out general accounting software that is not geared toward property owners specifically like xero and freshbooks. If you know differently, please shoot me a line! Meanwhile, the problem with investment property accounting software is that it is structured to help you track finances to pay taxes, not geared toward multi-scenario long term investment planning.
Stessa
- Accounting software that:
- Supports multiple properties
- Tracks rental performance
- Combines all your transactions and then auto-categorizes them for easy reporting and tax prep.
- Free for the above mentioned features. Rent analysis, mortgage financing and market research costs
- Good review here https://retipster.com/stessareview/ mentions the following issues, “One area I found Stessa a bit clumsy was its failure to retroactively assign transaction data to associate with a specific property. Even with only one property saved in the system, and one mortgage account hooked up, it didn’t automatically register the mortgage as being associated with my one property. Even after I assigned the mortgage account to the property, it didn’t go back and associate my previous mortgage payments with that property.”
QuickBooks
https://quickbooks.intuit.com/
- long time ago I looked at their rental property and real estate investment management version and found it generally unintuitive and cumbersome to use. In fairness, others love QBs and swear by it.
- That said, there may be some cash flow and planning integrations I haven’t explored that might make a big difference. Anybody using anything from here?
Real Estate Business Forecasting
While these don’t seem to integrate into personal finances (that I know of), they do seem provide a longer-term cash flow outlook for properties. I have not tired any of these (yet) but they are next on my list to check out:
Float Saas
https://floatapp.com/us/for-businesses/cash-flow-forecasting-saas/
- Cash Flow 3 year forecast
- What If Scenarios
- Must be used as plugin for QuickBooks or Xero. Boo Hiss.
- $69 mo.
Float Property
https://floatapp.com/us/for-businesses/cash-flow-real-estate-business/
- Cash Flow 3 year forecast
- What If Scenarios
- Must be used as plugin for QuickBooks or Xero. Boo Hiss.
- $69 mo.
CashFlowTool
https://www.cashflowtool.com/pro
- Cash Flow 6 mo. forecast
- What If Scenarios
- Works as standalone and plugin for QuickBooks
- $42 mo.
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