Property Listing Analyzer

Anytime you find yourself repeatedly researching and copying numbers, you should ask yourself if this $5 per hour data-entry labor can be outsourced or automated.

The BiggerPockets community often advises investors to analyze a lot of deals when getting started. While BiggerPockets has a great suite of analytical tools that allow you to compute property metrics and print custom reports for money lenders or partners, many of them require you to fill out one blank field after another for the property that you're analyzing—price, income streams, mortgage information, closing costs, fixed expenses and variable expenses. This hardly feels like the ideal path to analyzing a lot of deals.

The Property Listing Analyzer (the Analyzer) is a free, lightweight tool that I built to quickly screen deals. It is currently limited to Redfin listings, but it has the potential to save a ton of time on deal analysis. Before you dive deep into $5 per hour data-entry labor, see if a property is even worth your precious time.

How It Works

After installing the Analyzer, navigate to any Redfin listing page and click the extension's icon in your toolbar to activate it. It will examine the listing page and analyze the potential deal.

Why Redfin? Amongst the big listing sites such as Redfin, Realtor.com, and Zillow, Redfin has some of the best real estate data and is known to most closely resemble the MLS. It is also updated every 10 minutes. You can read more about Redfin's dedication to data quality here.

Despite this amazing amount of data, it can be a bit overwhelming to parse and extract the pieces that you need to plug into analytical tools. The Analyzer does this for you and only takes the data that matters to quickly analyze the deal. For example, the Analyzer automatically populates current rent, property taxes, HOA dues, as well as insurance and mortgage payment estimates. Additionally, variable expenses such as property management and capital expenditures are given a default percentage that is customizable. It hates blank fields almost as much as you do. Of course, Redfin has a ton of other information available for the evaluation of a listing's appreciation, school district or Walk Score if the property is worth a second look.

Not all listings provide current rent for the Analyzer to work with. Or, current rent is provided, but you'd like to turn a dining room into a bedroom and increase the rent. In either case, you can quickly tweak any part of the deal's values and the results tab will update with a new analysis. You can even adjust the price and see what value works for you to make a reasonable cash-on-cash return. If your browser closes, don't worry—any changes you make for the listing you are viewing will be saved.