Price a flip, a rental or a BRRRR against your own numbers and get an answer that is willing to be no. Maximum offer from the 70% rule, a rehab range built from published cost data, and the margin, cap rate, DSCR or refinance recovery your exit actually turns on — each one checked against a threshold that is printed rather than implied. No sign-up, no upload, no stored data.
Not at this price. It could work at a lower one.
Offer this instead
Buy it, fix it up, sell it. Judged on profit with room for a surprise.Each bar is a published threshold rather than a feeling, so you can disagree with a number instead of a vibe. One failed check means the deal could still work at a lower price — two means it can't.
Estimate only, from the numbers and photos you provided. Not an appraisal, BPO or broker opinion of value, and not investment advice. Verify comps, rents and scope with licensed local professionals before you offer.
The verdict above stays free forever, account or no account.
Maximum allowable offer = ARV × 0.70 − rehab. The part people get wrong is thinking the 30% is profit. It is not. It has to absorb your closing costs on the way in, the taxes, insurance and utilities you pay every month you own the thing, the points and interest on the money, the 6–8% it costs to sell, and whatever is behind the wall you have not opened yet. What is left after all of that is the profit, and on a thin deal there is nothing left at all.
That is why the rule is a screen, not an answer. It tells you what not to pay in ten seconds. Whether the deal works at that price is a different calculation — the one running above — and it is entirely possible to buy at the 70% number and still lose money on a six-month hold with expensive financing.
Nine areas of the property, each priced independently from the facts you have before you get inside — square footage, bed and bath count, stories, basement. Each area is graded on a five-step condition scale, from “leave it” through cosmetic, dated and worn to failed, and each grade maps to a different scope of work at a different cost tier. A failed area is priced 15% over a clean replacement, because opening one usually finds another.
The result is a range, never a single number — a low, a mid and a high — because a contractor who gives you one figure for work nobody has opened up yet is guessing with more confidence than the situation allows. If you want the same cost data without the deal math around it, the renovation cost calculator is the standalone version.
Run an Airbnb or short-term rental through the buy-and-hold exit, but do the arithmetic on the rent before you type it in. The number that belongs in the rent field is not the nightly rate and it is not the nightly rate times thirty. It is nightly rate × occupancy × 30, and occupancy in most markets is somewhere between 50% and 70% once you account for the season nobody visits.
Then raise the expense rate. The 45% default is a long-term rental assumption; a short-term rental carries cleaning between every stay, platform fees around 3%, consumables, higher utilities because guests do not pay them, furnishing that depreciates fast, and either a co-host at 15–25% or your own time. Somewhere between 55% and 70% is closer to honest, and a short-term rental that only works at a long-term rental's expense ratio does not work. The compensation is that the same property often grosses two to three times its long-term rent — which is exactly why the calculation is worth doing properly rather than optimistically.
Also check the regulations before the spreadsheet. A city that bans non-owner-occupied short-term rentals turns a 12% cash-on-cash STR into a 4% long-term rental overnight, and no calculator can see that coming for you.
A calculator that always ends in “looks promising!” is decoration. Every check above has two published numbers — the level it clears at and the level below which it fails — and the verdict is a plain function of how many checks failed. One failed check means the deal could work at a lower price, so it says negotiate and tells you what price. Two means walk.
The single most useful line the tool produces is the one that names the price at which the answer changes. Knowing a deal is bad is worth something; knowing it becomes good at $214,000 is what you take into the conversation with the seller.
Estimate only, from the numbers and photos you provided. Not an appraisal, BPO or broker opinion of value, and not investment advice. Verify comps, rents and scope with licensed local professionals before you offer.
After-repair value is the number every other number depends on, and it is the one people guess at. An ARV that is 10% too high turns a thin flip into a loss, because the error lands entirely on your margin — the purchase price, the rehab and the holding costs do not move to accommodate it.
Asking prices are opinions; closed sales are evidence. Pull three to five properties that actually sold in the last six months, within roughly half a mile in a suburb or a few blocks in a city, and stay on the same side of any boundary that changes the buyer pool — a school catchment, a main road, a railway line. Two houses four hundred metres apart with different catchments are not comparables.
The comparable has to be a house in the condition yours will be in when you are done. If your comps sold with builder-grade kitchens and you are budgeting for quartz and a range, you are either over-improving for the street or looking at the wrong comps. Beds and baths should match; a three-bed comp does not price a four-bed, and adding a bedroom without adding a bathroom rarely earns what the spreadsheet expects.
Work in price per square foot, discard the highest and lowest comp, and apply the median to your finished square footage. Then knock a few percent off, because the comps sold in a market that existed a few months ago and yours will sell in one that does not exist yet. If the deal only works at the top comp, it does not work.
Before you commit, have an agent who sells that street price it, or pay for a broker price opinion. It costs very little next to being wrong. An automated estimate from a portal is a starting point and nothing more — those models cannot see condition, which is the entire variable you are manipulating.
Most deals that fail on paper failed because of the rehab number. Most deals that fail in reality failed because of everything around it. These are the lines that go missing most often.
Holding costs. Mortgage interest or hard-money points, taxes, insurance (vacant-property insurance, which is dearer), utilities kept on for the trades, and lawn or snow service. They accrue every month the project runs, which is why a schedule slipping from four months to seven is a financial event and not just an annoying one.
Both sets of closing costs. You pay to buy and you pay to sell, and the sell side is the larger of the two once agent commission is in it. Budgeting only for the purchase is the most common single omission in a flip model.
Contingency. Ten to twenty per cent on the rehab, higher on anything pre-war or anything where you have not seen behind the walls. Old wiring, a failed sewer line, and asbestos in the artex are not unlucky — they are the base rate.
Permits and the time they take.The fee is small; the eight weeks are not. Anything structural, anything moving plumbing, and anything touching the panel will need one, and doing it without one surfaces at the buyer's inspection at the worst possible moment.
Your own time. Not a line in any calculator, including this one. If the project eats six months of evenings, the return has to beat what those evenings were otherwise worth.
Four figures do most of the work, and each answers a different question about the same property.
Cap rateis net operating income divided by price. It ignores your financing entirely, which is precisely what makes it useful: it compares this property to other properties rather than comparing your loan to someone else's. Use it to decide whether the asset is priced sensibly for the market.
Cash-on-cash return is annual cash flow divided by the cash you actually put in. This one does care about financing, and it is the number to compare against what the same money would do elsewhere.
DSCRis net operating income divided by debt service — how many times over the property covers its own loan. It is the lender's question, not yours, and if it comes in under about 1.20 the financing you assumed may not exist at the terms you assumed.
Monthly cash flow is the one you feel. A property can clear on cap rate and still hand you sixty dollars a month, which is not a margin — it is one boiler away from negative.
Where they disagree, believe the strictest one. A deal that passes on cap rate and fails on DSCR is a deal whose financing is the problem; a deal that passes on cash flow and fails on cash-on-cash is one where too much of your own money is tied up. The verdict above weighs them together, but the individual failures are what tell you which lever to pull.
Maximum offer = 70% of the after-repair value, minus the cost of the repairs. On a house worth $340,000 finished that needs $60,000 of work, that is $178,000. The 30% you are holding back is not profit — it covers your closing costs, the money you spend carrying the property while you own it, the financing, the 6–8% it costs to sell, and the surprises. Investors argue endlessly about whether the number should be 65% or 75%, which is why it is an input here rather than a constant.
After-repair value: what the property sells for once the work is finished. It comes from comparable sales — recently sold properties nearby, similar in size, age and condition to what yours will be after renovation. This tool takes ARV as your input and never invents one, because a number generated from a database of listings is not a comp and treating it as one is how people lose money. An ARV is not an appraisal and nothing here is one.
Above 7% clears the bar in this tool and below 5.5% fails it, with the band between marked thin. That is a national rule of thumb, not a law: cap rates are a market's opinion of risk, so 5% can be perfectly rational in an expensive coastal market and 9% can be a warning in a declining one. The thresholds are published so you can disagree with a specific number instead of with a vibe.
Most DSCR lenders want 1.20 to 1.25 — meaning net operating income covers the mortgage payment 1.2 to 1.25 times over. This tool passes at 1.25 and calls anything under 1.1 a fail. Below 1.0 the rent does not cover the debt at all and the property needs money from you every month, which is a decision rather than an investment.
Buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. The number that decides whether it worked is how much of your cash comes back out at the refinance: the new loan is a percentage of the after-repair value, it pays off the acquisition loan first, and whatever is left is returned to you. Recovering 90% or more clears the bar here. The rehab has to create the equity — if the property is worth roughly what you paid plus what you spent, there is nothing to refinance against.
No, and it is not financial advice. It is arithmetic over numbers you supply, using published cost ranges and stated thresholds. An estimate is where you start; an inspection is what you buy on. Nothing here is a valuation, and a rehab estimate is not a contractor's bid.
Not for the verdict. The whole underwrite runs in your browser and always will — no upload, no sign-up, no stored data. An account is for the line-by-line scope you forward to a contractor, per-area condition, reading condition off photos, and saving a deal so you can reprice it when the seller comes back.
The ARV you underwrote assumes the finished property gets presented properly. Grade the listing photos before they go live, and stage the rooms that are still empty — both free, both on the same account.