However, if you want to analyse your entire portfolio on an on-going basis or compare potential property investments, you might want to buy a more complex product such as PIA, RevIQ, or RentalAnalyst. Having said that, most users I’ve met have covered their costs very quickly thanks to the ability it gives them to make better investment decisions.
The spreadsheet was written by well-known author, financial planner and property investor Lisa Dudson.ĭolf de Roos’ REAP program is reasonably popular in New Zealand, but it’s expensive at US$445 for a download (US$495 as a boxed version). The New Zealand-produced Acumen Property Investment Spreadsheet costs just $29.95. These programs range in price from free downloads to more than $1000. These programs are quite simply when it comes to pre-purchase analysis even though the numbers and graphs they spit out are hugely powerful tools. Providing the program lets you enter local variables such as depreciation rates, tax rates, etc, you can use it.
In just five minutes or less your software should be able to strip away estate agent superlatives and lay bare its investment potential, giving you a comprehensive view of the immediate (first year) performance of any investment property, plus a year-by-year analysis of the next 10, 20 or even 30 years. With most of these programs, you enter the purchase price, potential rent, mortgage outgoings, management fees if any, depreciation estimates, body corporate charges and so on. But if you don’t want to be ruled by your heart, you can use property investment software to analyse the numbers. Very experienced investors can sometimes do due diligence more or less on sight. Property investment software is designed to take the guesswork out of property investment.
But if you want to learn how to set up macros, write visual basic code, and so on, for a few hundred bucks you can get someone to do the grunt work for you. That is how many of the products listed in this article started. If you’re a dab hand with a spreadsheet, you can do most of this yourself.
There is also body corporate management software, hand-held computer software, calculators such as mortgage and depreciation calculators and even property design software. The two main genres of software are investment analysis software that does the numbers, and property management software that can be used to track incomings and outgoings from a property under management. As well as crunching the numbers and stripping away estate agent superlatives, computer software can display the data in the form of graphs, which bring figures to life. It’s surprising, therefore, that so few investors use computers to analyse potential property purchases, work out depreciation, calculate mortgage repayments and even manage their property portfolio. Property investing is all about crunching numbers and computers can crunch far faster than the human brain.