Investor · O'Fallon, IL 62269 · Member since 2021 · 134 posts · 44 votes
Are there any websites out there that can find and calculate comps near your subject property without you having to do all the work looking for yourself? Something where you just plug in whatever information it requires and then tell you rents and what not based on a certain radius from your subject property? Thanks!
I've heard of rentometer.com. I wouldn't blindly trust those sites though. They use algorythms and no algorythm is perfect. That being said though, I have found that most of the time they are somewhat close but if it suggests $1400 and you can rent for $1600 a month thats $200 you are missing out on!
Are there any websites out there that can find and calculate comps near your subject property without you having to do all the work looking for yourself? Something where you just plug in whatever information it requires and then tell you rents and what not based on a certain radius from your subject property? Thanks!
The tradeoff is between the potential for automation and accuracy. Any time you drive to automate you have to deal with the garbage that bad realtors put into the MLS for rental units which sacrifices accuracy to save time. And when you manually sift through the rental data you can screen out the slop which invests time to achieve maximum accuracy.
To evaluate for a single property address what I would do is go to realtor.com (which directly sources from the MLS), hit the rent tab, put the county of the property you're evaluating, and go to map view for a zillow-like view of what rentals are actually listed at what rent price. You can filter by the beds and baths and other aspects to make the results as close as possible to the one you're comparing.
When I build my semi-automated hotsheet for investors, I take exports from the MLS from both the sales side and the rentals side, pull them into a SQL Server database, do some data cleaning to screen out as much of the garbage as possible, and run what I call my "magic query" that joins sale listing locations to rental listing locations by a conditional match on subdivision and beds/baths, or the average of the entire MLS if the subdivision is given as "METES & BOUNDS", with a flag in the output showing that those M 'n B rental numbers are MLS-wide averages for a given beds/baths and will need a more in-depth evaluation (like rentometer) if the estimated cash on cash return for a classic 20% down scenario, looks promising.