I am looking for some good software that will help me evaluate properties. What would someone recommend?
It wouldn’t be to hard to setup an excel spreadsheet. I’m sure there are software packages that make it all look nice, give you graphs and such but at the end of the day all you are interested in are the numbers.
Create a check list of items to check for repair. research rehab costs for each item and then add a few things like ARV, Comps, MAO forumla, your profit, estimated selling price and possibly and best case worst case scenario.
That should give you a nice and very useful tool.
There are lots of software products with a specific focus. What kind of evaluation do you want to do?
A calculator works fine. The biggest thing is knowing what things to put into the spreadsheet or software or calculator. For example, if you find a house that is worth $100,000 for sale for $50,000 is that a good deal or not? You don’t know unless you know what caused the house to be for sale for only $50,000. That is called the distress. If you know what that distress is you can find out what it will cost to relieve that distress and then if it is a deal or not. For example if the distress is that the house is sits next to the city dump then you can’t relieve that distress at any cost. If the distress is that it needs $6,000 in repairs that is a different story. The way to find out about what the distress is on any house is to talk to people about the house. That will give you more insight than any software. I talk to people about what the neighbors know (or think) about the house, I talk to contractors about what it will take toe make the house ready, and I talk to real estate agents about how much it will return in sales price of rent.
I want to punch in all the numbers such as down payment, interest amount, loan amount, etc. That way I can see how the property will generate vs the expected expenses.The loan information is the probably the most important since that is harder to do by hand.