Property Deal Analyzer

Start here

The whole point of this tool: figure out fast whether a property will pay you or cost you, and what you should offer for it.

Your 60-second check. Type in the price, the rents, and your loan terms. Leave everything else alone the first time. Then look only at the four big boxes at the top — they're color-coded, and each one shows the target you're trying to beat:

1. DSCR — will a bank lend on this? Under 1.15 and the deal usually can't get financed at all, so nothing else matters.
2. Cash-on-cash — does it put money in your pocket this year? Negative means you pay to own it.
3. Monthly cash flow — the same thing in dollars. $100+ per unit per month is the classic cushion.
4. IRR — your total yearly return once you count the sale. This is the "was it worth doing" number.

Then read the pink box underneath — it tells you what to actually offer to hit those targets, and how far that is from the asking price. If the gap is more than about 15%, the seller almost certainly won't come down that far and you should move on.

Green means it clears the bar, amber is marginal, red means it fails. A deal needs DSCR and cash-on-cash to be green or amber. If either is red, nothing else on the page can save it. Most deals die right here — that's normal and it's the tool doing its job.

Everything in the "Supporting numbers" row below is context — useful for understanding why a deal works, but not for deciding.

Turning sections off

Three of the input sections have a switch in their header. Flipping one off doesn't just hide the boxes — it changes the math to match, and hides the outputs that no longer mean anything. Use them to strip a deal down to the question you actually care about.

Financing → off = all cash

Removes the loan entirely. Your cash in becomes the full purchase price, there's no mortgage payment, and DSCR stops applying (a bank isn't involved) — so that box switches to cap rate, which is the real return when there's no debt.
Useful for: all-cash offers, or seeing how much of your return is coming from leverage rather than the property itself. Flip it on and off and watch cash-on-cash move — that gap is what the loan is doing for you.

Taxes & depreciation → off = pre-tax only

Skips depreciation, the tax shield, and the recapture bill at sale. Every number becomes straight pre-tax, and the Tax tab disappears.
Useful for: a fast first screen when you don't want to think about tax yet, or comparing a deal to someone else's numbers who quoted pre-tax figures. Also honest if you're not sure you can use the passive losses.

Projection & exit → off = Year 1 only

Stops modeling future years and the sale. No growth assumptions, no IRR, no exit proceeds. The IRR box switches to break-even occupancy, and the Pro forma and Exit tabs disappear.
Useful for: the "does this thing cash flow today" question, without any assumptions about the future. This is the most honest view of a deal, because every number left on screen is something you can verify right now rather than guess at.

The overall score adjusts too — it only grades the tests still in play, so turning a section off doesn't unfairly drag the score down.

Switch settings save with each deal, so you can keep one property on a quick Year-1 screen and another on the full analysis.

If it survives, dig in. Now go get real numbers — a real insurance quote, the real tax rate, real rent comps from similar units nearby. Then check the other tabs.

The %/$ button. Any field with a % beside it can flip to dollars. Click it, or hit "Show all as $" at the top. Why bother? "8% management fee" doesn't mean much. "$5,714 a year" does. Same number, easier gut-check. You can type in either one.

Single family works fine here. Switch "Property type" to Single family and the unit count disappears — you just enter one rent. Everything else works the same. One thing to watch: a single-family rental has no cushion. One vacancy is 100% vacant, not 25%. Consider nudging the vacancy assumption up a couple of points to reflect that.

What the buttons do

Save deal

Keeps this deal in a list so you can click back to it later. Name it in the "Deal name" box first, then hit Save. It shows up as a little chip under the Property section — click the name to reload it, click the × to delete it.
The limitation: it saves into this browser on this computer. Open the tool on your phone or a different laptop and the list will be empty. That's what the next two buttons are for.

Copy link — my numbers

Squeezes the entire deal into a web address and copies it.
Every number you've typed gets encoded into the long jumble after the # in the URL. Paste that link anywhere — text it to yourself, email it — and when you open it, every field is already filled in. This is how you move one deal from your laptop to your phone.

⚠️ This link contains your financials, and they are not encrypted. The jumble is base64, which is just a way of writing text — anyone with the link can paste it into a free online decoder and read your numbers without ever opening the page. Treat this link like a screenshot of your mortgage statement. Send it to yourself, not to a group chat.

Share blank tool

Copies a clean link to the empty calculator, with none of your data in it.
This is the one to send to a partner, your agent, or a friend. They get the full working tool with default numbers and see nothing about your properties.

Why it needs its own button: the app writes your current deal into the address bar as you type, so copying the URL straight out of the browser's address bar will include your numbers. This button strips all that off, so you don't have to think about it.

Where your deals actually live

Saved deals sit in your browser's own storage on the device you're using. They are never uploaded anywhere and they are not part of the hosted page. That's why someone opening the site sees a blank calculator — and also why your saved list doesn't follow you to a new device unless you use Backup/Restore.

Backup deals / Restore

Backup downloads your whole saved list as a single file. Restore loads that file back in.
The practical use: save the backup file into your OneDrive folder. Then on your other laptop, open the tool and hit Restore, and your whole deal library comes with you. Restoring merges — deals with the same name get updated, new ones get added, nothing is wiped.

Export CSV

Downloads the numbers as a spreadsheet, if you'd rather do your own analysis in Excel or share the raw figures.

Print / PDF

Opens the print dialog. Choose "Save as PDF" as the destination and you've got a clean one-page summary to hand a lender, a partner, or your CPA.

Analyzing a property you already own

Switch the top dropdown to "A property I already own" and the tool changes the question it's answering. Instead of "should I buy this?" it answers "should I keep this?" — which is a genuinely different question with a different math.

You'll enter when you bought it, what you paid, what it's worth today, and what you still owe. The tool works out how much depreciation you've already burned through, how much is left, and what your money is actually doing right now.

Return on equity — the number that matters once you own it

Cash-on-cash asks "what am I earning on what I put in?" Return on equity asks "what am I earning on what's trapped in there right now?"

Here's the trap almost everybody falls into. Say you bought a house for $285,000 with $60,000 down. It's worth $395,000 now and you owe $208,000 — so you've got roughly $160,000 of equity sitting in it. It cash-flows $200 a month and you think, great, I'm making money.

But $2,400 a year on $160,000 of equity is a 1.5% return. Your money would do better in a savings account.

The property didn't get worse — it got better. That's exactly the problem. As it appreciates and the loan gets paid down, more and more of your net worth gets locked inside it earning almost nothing. The rent doesn't grow as fast as the equity does.

What to do about it: when return on equity falls below what you could earn elsewhere, you've got three moves — cash-out refinance and redeploy the equity, 1031 exchange into something bigger, or sell. Doing nothing is also a choice; just make it deliberately instead of by accident.

Why the depreciation numbers matter here

The tool shows what you've already deducted and what's left. Two reasons to care:
• The clock is running. You get 27.5 years, total. Five years in, you've used about 18% of your best tax benefit. What's left is what you have to work with from here.
• Recapture is waiting. Every dollar you've deducted gets taxed back at up to 25% when you sell. The Exit tab shows exactly what that bill looks like — usually the moment people start taking a 1031 exchange seriously.

What "cash invested" means in this mode

It switches from "cash you put in years ago" to "equity you'd walk away with if you sold today, after selling costs."
That's the honest comparison, because that's the money you could actually go do something else with. What you paid back in 2021 is a sunk cost and shouldn't drive today's decision.

Keep it, sell it, or 1031? — the panel most analyzers don't have

This answers the question owning a rental actually raises: should I still own this?

All three options start from the same place — the equity you have today — and are measured the same way: what is this money worth at the end of your hold period?

Keep it — your equity plus future appreciation and loan paydown, minus every dollar of cash flow you feed it along the way, minus tax at the eventual sale.
Sell & invest — pay the recapture and capital gains now, put what's left somewhere else. Crucially it also invests the money you'd have been feeding the property, which is why it often wins even when the property appreciates.
1031 exchange — defer all the tax and roll the full amount into another property. More capital keeps working, but it must go back into real estate on a tight clock.

The one number that decides it is "if you sold, what could that money earn?" Set it honestly. If you'd genuinely put it in an index fund, use a long-run market number. If it would sit in a savings account, use that instead — a lazy alternative makes keeping look better, and that's a real answer too.

The verdict line gives you the tipping point: the appreciation rate at which keeping catches up to selling. If that number is higher than what you honestly expect from the area, the property is telling you something.

The numbers everyone throws around

These are the terms you'll hear from brokers and other investors. Here's what they actually mean.

NOI (Net Operating Income)

Rent collected minus the cost of running the place — before the mortgage.
Think of it as the property's paycheck before its own bills. It leaves out your loan on purpose, so you can compare two buildings without your financing muddying it up. Almost every other number comes from this one.

Cap rate

What the property would earn you if you paid all cash. NOI ÷ price.
A 6% cap means: pay $1,000,000 cash, pocket $60,000 a year. It's a way to compare deals on equal footing, like MPG on a car.
Higher cap = cheaper property, usually rougher area or more risk. Lower cap = pricier, usually nicer area. Austin trades at low caps. Dallas is usually a bit higher.
Careful: cap rate ignores your loan completely. A deal can have a great cap rate and still bleed you dry every month once the mortgage hits.

Cash-on-cash return

The money you actually pocket this year, divided by the cash you put in.
Put in $200,000, collect $16,000 over the year → 8%. That's it.
This is the most honest "am I making money?" number. Shoot for 6–10% right now. It ignores the property going up in value and your loan getting paid down, so your real return is usually better than this — but this is the one that tells you whether you're fed or starving.

DSCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio)

Does the property earn enough to cover its own mortgage? NOI ÷ mortgage payments.
1.00 = it exactly covers the mortgage, with nothing left over. 1.25 = it earns $1.25 for every $1.00 of mortgage. That extra 25 cents is your cushion.
This is the bank's number. Most lenders want 1.20–1.25 minimum or they won't do the loan. Below 1.15, you're one broken A/C away from writing a check.
Worth knowing: there are loans literally called "DSCR loans" that qualify you based on the property's number instead of your personal income. That's how a lot of side investors keep buying without their day-job debt ratios blocking them.

Equity multiple

How many times you got your money back.
Put in $200,000, walk away with $400,000 total → 2.0×. You doubled it.
1.0× = you broke even. Under 1.0× = you lost money.
It doesn't care how long it took, which is its weakness. Doubling your money in 3 years is fantastic. Doubling it in 20 years is worse than a savings account was in a good year. So always read it next to IRR.

IRR (Internal Rate of Return)

Your yearly return, counting everything, including how long it took.
This is the "one number to rule them all." It rolls together your monthly cash flow, the loan being paid down, the property going up in value, and the profit when you sell — then boils it into one annual percentage, like an interest rate on a savings account.
Big investors want 12–18%.
The catch: a big chunk of IRR comes from the sale price you assumed. Assume you sell high, and IRR looks amazing on paper. Garbage in, garbage out. Don't fall in love with an IRR built on a rosy guess.

Break-even occupancy

How full you have to stay just to not lose money.
80% is comfortable — you can have a unit empty and be fine. Over 100% means the property loses money even when every unit is rented. At that point you're not investing, you're just betting the price goes up.

Expense ratio

What share of the rent gets eaten by running costs.
35–50% is normal for small multifamily. So on $70,000 of rent, expect $25,000–$35,000 to disappear into taxes, insurance, repairs, and management.
If a broker hands you a sheet showing 25%, they left something out. Usually management, repair savings, or the property tax going up after you buy.

GRM and "the 1% rule"

Quick napkin math, nothing more.
GRM = price ÷ yearly rent. Lower is better. The 1% rule says monthly rent should be at least 1% of the price ($750,000 house → $7,500/mo rent). Almost nothing in Austin hits that anymore. Use them as a rough smell test, not a decision.

Property

Purchase price

What you'd pay. Start with the asking price, then use the Break-even tab to find what you should actually offer.

Closing costs

The pile of fees you pay just to complete the purchase. Title, appraisal, inspection, lender fees, prepaid taxes and insurance.
Budget 2–3% of the price for a small place, 3–5% for bigger multifamily. On a $620,000 property that's $15,000–$30,000 in cash, on top of your down payment. This is why "25% down" never really means 25%.

Rehab / CapEx at purchase

Money you'll spend right after closing to fix the place up. More cash out of your pocket now, but it also raises your "basis," which means bigger tax write-offs later.

ARV / stabilized value

What it'll be worth once it's fixed up and rented.
If that's higher than what you paid plus what you spent, the difference is instant profit on paper. That's the whole idea behind buying fixer-uppers. If it comes out negative, you paid full retail.

Rent roll

Current vs. market rent

Current = what tenants pay right now. Market = what you could get if you re-rented today.
The gap is your opportunity. A place renting for $1,395 in a $1,600 neighborhood has $205/month of upside per unit.
Do this: run the numbers on current rents first. If it only works using market rents, you're paying today for work you haven't done yet — and if raising rents takes longer than you think, you eat the difference.

Other income

Coin laundry, parking spots, pet rent, storage, and billing utilities back to tenants. Small stuff, but it's usually the easiest money you'll ever add to a small property.

Vacancy + credit loss

Your assumption for empty units and tenants who don't pay.
It's not just empty months — it's also the two weeks between tenants, the free month you offered to fill a unit, and the guy who skipped out owing you rent.
Use 5–8% for a decent area, 10%+ for rougher properties or if you're renovating and turning units. Brokers love to show you 3%. Don't believe it.

Financing

Down payment

20–25% down for 2–4 units. 25–30% once you hit 5+ units, where the bank looks at the property's income instead of your paycheck.

Amortization

How many years the payment is stretched over. A 30-year stretch means a smaller monthly payment than a 20-year one — better cash flow, but you pay more interest overall and build equity slower.
Heads up on bigger properties: commercial loans often stretch payments over 30 years but demand the whole remaining balance back in year 5, 7, or 10. That's a "balloon." You'll have to refinance or sell by then, so make your hold period match it.

Payment basis — using your lender's quote

If your loan officer gave you a single monthly payment, switch this to "Use my lender's payment" and type it in. That number is usually PITI — Principal, Interest, Taxes, and Insurance all bundled together, because the lender collects the taxes and insurance from you monthly and pays them for you. That pot of money is called escrow.

You'll enter two things: the total payment, and how much of it is escrow. Your Loan Estimate breaks this out — look for the "Estimated Escrow" line. When you do, the separate property tax and insurance inputs disappear, because the escrow already covers them.

Why it asks you to split it out instead of just taking the one number: this is the part that quietly breaks most homemade spreadsheets. Taxes and insurance are operating expenses — they come out before NOI. Principal and interest are debt service — they come out after. If you dump the whole PITI in as your mortgage payment, your NOI, cap rate, and DSCR all come out looking better than reality, because the taxes and insurance never got subtracted. The tool splits them so those numbers stay honest.

You still enter the interest rate, because it's needed to work out how much of each payment is interest — that's the part you get to deduct on your taxes.

There's also a PMI field. If you're putting less than 20% down you're likely paying mortgage insurance. Some lenders bundle it into escrow, some quote it separately — if it's already inside your escrow number, leave this at zero so you don't double-count it.

Loan points / fees — you asked about this one

A "point" is 1% of the loan, paid to the lender in cash at closing. Borrow $465,000, one point costs you $4,650.

It shows up two ways:
• The lender charges it just to give you the loan. It's their fee.
• You choose to pay it to get a lower interest rate. This is called "buying down the rate."

Why you should care: it's how you catch a lender quoting a fake-low rate. Lender A offers 6.5% but charges 2 points. Lender B offers 6.9% with no points. Lender A looks better — but you're paying $9,300 upfront for that lower rate. They're basically the same deal.

How to decide: take what the point costs you, divide by how much it saves you per month. That's how many months until it pays off.
Example: $4,650 upfront to save $95/month → 49 months, about 4 years. Keep the property longer than 4 years and paying the point was smart. Sell or refinance before that and you wasted the money.

Since you're modeling a 7-year hold, buying points usually wins. But test it — bump this field up and drop the rate, and watch what happens.

In this tool, points get added to your cash needed at closing, which drags down your returns. That's on purpose. It's the honest way to see it.

Interest-only period

You pay only the interest for the first few years — none of the loan balance.
Your payment drops, so cash flow looks great. But you're not paying anything off, and when it ends the payment jumps.
Use it to get through a renovation. Don't use it to make a bad deal look good.

Operating expenses

Property tax — read this one twice

This kills more Texas deals than anything else.
Texas has no state income tax, so the counties get their money from property taxes instead — and they're steep. Around 1.8–2.1% in Travis County (Austin) and 2.2–2.6% in Dallas County.

Here's the trap: the seller's tax bill is not going to be your tax bill. When you buy, the county re-values the property at what you paid. Someone who's owned a building for 15 years might be taxed as if it's worth $300,000. You pay $620,000, and your tax bill nearly doubles.

On a $620,000 property at 2.2%, that's $13,640 a year — over $1,100 a month, before you've paid a dime of mortgage.

This tool assumes the reassessment happens, because it will. And that homestead cap that limits increases on your own house? Doesn't apply to rentals.

Insurance

Going up fast in Texas thanks to hail and wind claims. Get a real quote — don't guess.

Property management

8–10% of the rent, plus a fee each time they place a new tenant.
Include this even if you plan to manage it yourself. If the deal only works because you're doing the work for free, it's not a good deal — it's a job you bought.

Maintenance vs. CapEx reserve

Maintenance is small and constant: a running toilet, a service call.
CapEx is big and rare: the roof, the A/C units, the water heaters, repaving.

Both are real, but CapEx doesn't send you a monthly bill — it sends you a $9,000 bill in year four, all at once. Setting aside 5–8% of rent for each keeps a couple of good months from fooling you into thinking you found a great deal.

Taxes & depreciation

This is the part most people don't understand, and it's a big reason real estate beats other investments.

Depreciation

The government lets you pretend the building is wearing out, and deduct it — even while it's going up in value.
You write off the building (not the land) over 27.5 years. On a $620,000 fourplex that's roughly $18,000 a year you get to deduct from your rental income.
You didn't spend that $18,000. Nothing left your bank account. It's a paper expense that lowers your tax bill on real money you collected. That's the magic.

Land allocation

You can't depreciate dirt, only the building. So you split the price between them. 15–25% for land is typical. Your county appraisal district already publishes a split — use that so you can back it up.

Cost segregation

Paying an engineer to find everything in the building that wears out faster than the building itself — so you can write it off sooner.
Carpet, appliances, cabinets, light fixtures, landscaping, parking. Instead of deducting those over 27.5 years, you deduct them over 5, 7, or 15. Usually pulls 20–30% of the value forward.
The study costs about $5,000–$15,000, so it's generally worth it on properties above roughly $500,000 — but only if you can actually use the deduction. See the next one, because this is where people get burned.

Bonus depreciation

Lets you take that cost-segregated chunk all in year one instead of spreading it out. The percentage allowed keeps changing with tax law, so confirm the current year's rate with your CPA.

Passive losses — the setting that matters most

The short version: a big rental write-off usually can't reduce the taxes on your day-job paycheck.

The IRS treats rental income as "passive." Passive losses can only cancel out passive income — not your W-2 salary. So you might generate a huge $100,000 paper loss from cost segregation and get nothing off your salary this year.

The loss isn't gone. It gets parked and carried forward until you either have rental profits to cancel out, or you sell.

There are ways around it, and they're all genuinely hard:
• Up to $25,000 of losses if you're actively involved — but it phases out between $100,000 and $150,000 of income, so most people with a good W-2 don't qualify.
• Real Estate Professional Status — 750+ hours a year and more than half your working time in real estate. Nearly impossible with a full-time job, though a non-working spouse can sometimes qualify.
• Short-term rentals — if average stays are 7 days or less and you're materially involved, the IRS doesn't treat it as a rental at all, and the loss can hit your regular income.

Leave this on "No — suspend" unless you're certain you qualify. Flipping it to "Yes" makes the returns look dramatically better, and assuming it wrongly is the single most common way people talk themselves into a deal they shouldn't buy.

Depreciation recapture

The bill comes due when you sell.
All those years of depreciation deductions? When you sell, the IRS takes some of it back — taxed at up to 25%. You didn't dodge the tax, you delayed it. The rest of your profit gets taxed at the lower capital gains rate (0%, 15%, or 20%).

Two common ways people deal with it:
• 1031 exchange — roll the money straight into another property and kick the tax down the road again. Strict deadlines: 45 days to pick the next property, 180 days to close.
• Never sell. When you die, your heirs inherit at current market value and the whole tax bill vanishes. Morbid, but it's a real strategy people build around.

Phantom income

Owing taxes on money you never actually got.
Happens in later years. Your depreciation runs out, and more of your mortgage payment goes to principal — which isn't deductible. So on paper you "made" $8,000, but your bank account never saw it. You still owe tax on it.
It's one of the quieter reasons people do a 1031 exchange and move on before it starts to hurt.

The sensitivity tables (a.k.a. "what if I'm wrong?")

Any single set of numbers is a guess. These grids show you how badly things go if your guess is off.

Price × rate. Shows what happens if rates move before you close, and how much you'd need to knock off the price to make up for it. Handy when deciding whether to lock your rate.

Exit cap × rent growth. This is the real stress test. "Exit cap" is just what the next buyer will pay for the income when you sell — a higher exit cap means a lower sale price.
The discipline rule: assume you'll sell at a worse cap rate than you bought at. If a deal only works when you assume you'll sell at a better one, you're betting on the market, not on the building. Notice how fast the returns fall apart as that number goes up — that's the risk you can't control.

Break-even table. This is your negotiating ammo. "Max price for 8% cash-on-cash" is the number you work backward from when you write an offer. If it's $180,000 below asking, you already know how that conversation goes.