Real estate investing involves more than just “buying low.” Depending on your niche or investing strategy, you’ll need different software, analysis tools and online services.
Some platforms specialize in financial modeling, others in market research and comparable sales, property sourcing or property management. Like every job, you need the right tools if you want to succeed at it.
Try these websites and platforms for each need in your real estate investment business.
Deal Prospecting & Lead Management: REsimpli
Best For: Real estate wholesalers, flippers and BRRRR investors actively prospecting for off-market deals.
You knew REsimpli would make an appearance. Might as well make it now!
As a real estate investing CRM, REsimpli excels at managing your lead lists with features like list stacking. You can filter your leads to find the most likely sellers, such as those appearing on both a pre-foreclosure list and a non-owner-occupied list.
The CRM automates your follow-up with leads, letting you create different automations for leads in different phases. Hot leads that just came in need aggressive follow up for example, with repeated texts, phone calls, emails and so forth. Others who haven’t responded for a while can go on long-term automated drip campaigns, perhaps simply receiving a text message or direct mail letter every few months.
Optional AI agents help personalize these campaigns, using the context from each lead’s file. Agents can also manage your leads, moving them from one list or campaign to another based on your communication with them.
REsimpli also tracks your marketing sources, cost per lead and cost per deal, so you can tell which marketing campaigns offer the best bang for your buck. Where you should double down, and where you should consider pulling back.
Calculators & Beginner Education: BiggerPockets
Best For: Beginners in all real estate investing strategies.
What started as a simple message board for real estate investors in 2004 has grown into a huge platform serving every niche of investors.
BiggerPockets offers a slew of free real estate investing calculators for various niches, which makes a great place to start. For example, they have rental cash flow calculators, flip calculators, BRRRR calculators, rehab estimate calculators, short-term rental calculators and more.
For outstanding free real estate education, check out their real estate blog and podcasts (plural — they have several), a place where BiggerPockets shines. They now have an in-house publishing company that has published dozens of outstanding books by experts in each real estate investing niche.
Ultimately, BiggerPockets remains a community and networking platform first and foremost, with outstanding forums for real estate investors. It also features great directories for support services like lenders, insurance, real estate agents and more.
Financial Underwriting: DealCheck
Best For: Active real estate investors looking for robust deal analysis and underwriting.
To dig deeper into the numbers of a deal, try DealCheck.
It provides detailed financial analysis for flips, turnkey rentals, BRRRR deals, multifamily properties, commercial properties and short-term rentals. You can run the numbers for metrics like cash flow, net operating income (NOI), capitalization rate (cap rate), cash-on-cash return and projected profits.
Tools like this let you play around with the numbers and see what would make a deal work — and what pushes it over the line as not worth pursuing. You can adjust the financing terms, renovation budgets and operating expenses to test different scenarios.
To make the analysis even easier, DealCheck includes sales and rent comparables (comps). Knowing the exact market data lets you calculate a maximum allowable offer.
Property Data & Comps: PropStream
Best For: Deal sourcing and off-market prospect lists for active investors.
PropStream has great tools to help you find motivated off-market sellers. Filtering by geography, you can pull up pre-foreclosure properties, tax sales, divorces and other distressed properties. You can also switch to a map view if you prefer.
The platform integrates public records such as mortgage and tax liens as well. Combined with its built-in comps and market value estimator, you can instantly ballpark the equity in any prospective property. The market research tools also help you calculate the likely after-repair value (ARV).
Nowadays, PropStream’s AI generates property summaries to highlight the most relevant details like owner equity, comparable properties and the best investment opportunities.
MLS-Based Deal Research: Privvy
Best For: House flippers.
Prefer on-market deals? Privvy taps into the MLS to help you find the best deals available.
The platform helps you filter by your preferred screening criteria, from distressed sellers to vacant properties to public records — all combined with MLS data. You can instant view comps and pull property reports, for both property values and rents.
Privvy boasts that it’s the only platform in the country that includes before- and after transaction data on completed flips. It also helps BRRRR investors run their numbers and compare against live market data.
While Privvy works in over 150 US markets, it doesn’t work in every zip code in the country, so make sure it covers your area before pulling the trigger on a paid membership commitment.
Rental Market Analytics: Mashvisor
Best For: Buy-and-hold investors.
Mashvisor helps you run rental comps, estimate market rents and forecast cash flow. That includes market-level and neighborhood-level data on rents, occupancy rates, cap rates and cash-on-cash return.
And not just for long-term rentals, either. Mashvisor incorporates Airbnb data for short-term rentals as well.
As a fun visual option, you can view neighborhood heat maps to get really granular in where to invest. It makes a great tool for identifying new cities or neighborhoods to invest, and to help kickstart your research into whether to rent long-term or as a vacation rental.
Short-Term Rental Deep Dives: AirDNA
Best For: Short-term rental investors.
Tapping data from Airbnb and VRBO, AirDNA helps you run a deep analysis on any property you’re considering as a short-term rental.
That starts with the potential nightly income and average daily rates, but it doesn’t end there. AirDNA also pulls up seasonal differences in both rents and occupancy, to help paint a more complete picture of annual cash flow.
Its “Rentalizer Agent” feature also evaluates comparable listings, guest demand, amenities and potential regulatory restrictions. By comparing demand to competition from other STR operators in the neighborhood, the platform gives you a sense for market saturation.
Great tools help with your due diligence, they don’t replace it. Make sure you stay conservative when you estimate property management, cleaning, utilities, maintenance and financing expenses.
Estimating Market Rents: Rentometer
Best For: Long-term landlords.
Rentometer has been around for a long time, and keeps getting better.
Start with it as a first pass to estimate the market rent for any prospective property, or when considering a rent raise at your existing property. Then dig into deeper features such as detailed rent comp reports.
The platform’s Deal Worksheet feature also lets you dig into detailed calculations for rental cash flow and returns, with fine-tune control over expenses and other sources of income.
Financial Performance Tracking for Rentals: Stessa
Best For: Buy-and-hold investors.
Stessa helps automate your bookkeeping and accounting as a landlord, organizing rental income, operating expenses, transactions and property-level financial records. Leave no expense un-deducted!
Beyond the bookkeeping help, Stessa’s reporting tools help you monitor cash flow and profitability for each property in your portfolio. It also compares your initial projections to actual returns and cash flow.
That helps you immediately spot under-performers before they metastasize into full-blown nightmares.
While many of the tools above help you analyze potential deals before you buy them, Stessa helps you crunch the numbers for your existing properties. Why? To maximize profits on them, rather than letting them drift.
The Best Tool Depends on Your Investment Strategy
There’s no one-size-fits-all tool that’s best for every real estate investor in the country.
Different investing strategies require different niche tools. Experiment with platforms that serve your specific investing approach, to find the ones that work best for you. You might need more than one tool, but aim for as few as possible. That keeps both your costs and your business’s complexity as low as possible.
Software and online tools can and should help you pull and analyze more leads, make more offers, or do more deals. But at the end of the day, they can’t replace knowledge, skill or good decisions. Verify every investing assumption, inspect every property, perform deep due diligence and most of all keep learning and becoming a better investor.
