RETURN TO HOMEAre you a real estate investor? Or a real estate agent who markets properties to investors? If someone showed you a handful of properties, how would you know which one is the best investment?
One property might need a lot of repairs. Another might be discounted significantly below market value. Another might have good cash flow with a stable tenant, but the price seems a little high. How can you do a true apples-to-apples comparison between these properties?
The traditional approach has been to create your own spreadsheets or use complicated desktop software. Creating your own spreadsheet is very time consuming, and it doesn’t look very professional. Most of the other real estate analysis software is quite expensive, and can only be used on your computer.
Property Analysis in Your Pocket
Thanks to a company called Real Estate Tools, there’s a better way! Now you can analyze real estate investments with an app called Property Evaluator. It works on the iPad or iPhone, so you can create a complete financial analysis while you’re on-site looking at the property. It takes the guesswork out of finding the best deal!
Impress Your Clients, Lenders, or Investment Partners 
After you enter the property information you can email a financial projection to your client, lender, or investment partner as a professionally formatted PDF file. You can even include a photo of the property, and a cover page with your contact info. Here’s a sample PDF Report.
Features
Property Evaluator includes all of the features and financial metrics that an investor would expect. Here’s a quick summary:
• Analyze residential, multi-unit, and commercial properties
• Compare Cash Flow, Cap Rate, Return on Investment, and other key financial metrics
• Email a PDF Report to your clients, lenders, or investment partners, you can read all document on SodaPDF.
• View a map of the property location within the app
• Includes a cost estimator for improvements and repairs
• Built-in mortgage calculator with complete payment schedules
A Unique Combination of Power and Flexibility
Property Evaluator was designed from the ground up to be very user-friendly. One of the biggest software design challenges is making an app that is powerful, flexible, and user-friendly at the same time. Property Evaluator does this in several ways.
For example, you can enter the closing costs as a single value or as an itemized list of expenses. Additionally, you can enter each expense as a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of some other value. So you could enter a fixed appraisal fee of $300, and have the real estate commission be 6% of the purchase price.
Another powerful feature is the ability to change the holding period from 1 to 30 years and see the numbers instantly update on the screen. You just slide your finger back and forth on the bottom of the screen to change this holding period. This helps you quickly see how many years it will take for the property to break even, and how many years it will take to produce a good Return on Investment.
There’s an App for Flippers Too
The Property Evaluator app is design for buy and hold investment properties. Investors who flip properties do a different set of calculations, so there’s a separate app designed specifically for them called Property Flipper.
Property Flipper starts with the estimated market value of the property after repairs. Then it subtracts the selling costs, improvement costs, holding costs, buying costs, and purchase price to calculate the net profit on the deal. Alternatively, you can enter the desired profit, and the app will calculate the maximum price you can pay to make that profit.
What happens if the improvements take 3 months longer than expected? How will that change your profit? Property Flipper gives you the answer quickly and easily. You can change the holding period from 1 to 12 months with a slider at the bottom of the screen, and you can instantly see how this would affect your profit.
The Power of Being Mobile
For many types of real estate investments, speed and efficiency are extremely important. You might see a potential deal today that will be gone tomorrow. Property Evaluator and Property Flipper give you the ability to analyze a property on the spot in 5 minutes using your iPhone or iPad.
Both apps are available on the App Store. Just search for Property Evaluator or Property Flipper, or use the following links:
Property Evaluator for the iPad
Property Evaluator for the iPhone
Property Flipper for the iPhone
About the Author
Joel Grasmeyer is a real estate investor, engineer, and entrepreneur who started PropertyTracker.com in 2004 to create user-friendly, yet powerful tools for real estate analysis. In 2008, he created Property Evaluator for the iPhone. In 2010 he launched RealEstateTools.com to market a variety of real estate tools for mobile devices.
Contact Information:
Real Estate Tools, Inc.
Joel Grasmeyer – CEO and Founder
http://www.realestatetools.com
http://www.realestatetools.com/blog
http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelgrasmeyer
(888)802-1040
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This guest post is part of our Technology Tuesday Series. We seek out the latest and greatest technology companies out there whom we feel offer cutting edge products and services to consumers. Our readers are interested in the financial and real estate industries as consumers and professionals. If you feel that you or your company has something wonderful to offer and would like to write about it, please contact us at liz@dalesiegel.com