How are you actually tracking your portfolio performance across all your properties?

Question

I've got a handful of rentals and I'm starting to look at my next few acquisitions. The thing that's been bugging me lately is I don't have a clean way to see how my whole portfolio is actually performing in one place.

Like — I can run numbers on a new deal fine, but when I'm trying to figure out if I should sell one property to fund another, or refi vs hold, or just understand which of my properties is actually my best performer after all expenses... I'm bouncing between spreadsheets, my bank account, and my own memory.

For those of you with 5-15+ doors — how are you actually making portfolio-level decisions? Is anyone using something that pulls it all together, or is everyone just running their own spreadsheets and gut feel?

Not talking about property management software for tenants/maintenance — more the investment strategy side. What should I hold, sell, buy next, and why.

Drew Sygit · Answer

You should have accounting software where you are entering income/expenses to do P&Ls for each property.

Can be something only accounting-focused like Quickbooks, or DIY property management software with built-in accounting like RentRedi, Hemline or Doorloop.

Ryan Flanagan · Answer

To me, the art of maximizing return on equity (ROE) while maintaining somewhat healthy cash flows to keep you safe is how the game is played. You can have ROE that is poor because of poor management/performance or because there has been massive appreciation and there's the option to refinance and re-deploy capital elsewhere.

Taking every penny possible out of equity to have 20 doors that cash flow $5 a month (but maximizing ROE) doesn't make sense to me, personally. But neither does having a fully paid off $1M property (and minimizing ROE). It's really more of an art than a science, and every investor has their own philosophy.

In any case, feel free to DM me and I'd be happy to show you exactly how I would measure both property and portfolio-level performance for your investments. We're all doing this for the returns. Figuring out what return metrics are important to you is key.

Happy investing.

Basit Siddiqi · Answer

If you have everything set up within an accounting software(REIHUB, Quickbooks, etc) you can run different reports such as an income statement by property by year.You can examine it for the following1) How profitable / unprofitable a property has been over several years.2) Expenses by year(Are they going up and by how much and is there anything that you can do to reduce it)Best of luck!

Eduardo Cavasotti · Answer

@Finnegan McDonnell this is the question I wish I had asked earlier. I have 10 doors in Birmingham, all Section 8, all with third party property managers. For the first 4 or 5 properties I could keep track of performance in my head. After that it became impossible without real systems.

To answer your actual question about portfolio level decisions, here are the metrics I track per property and how I use them:

Net Operating Income (NOI) per property. This is gross rent minus all operating expenses (management fees, repairs, insurance, taxes, vacancy). NOI tells you how each property performs operationally before debt service. If one property has a significantly lower NOI margin than the others, that tells you something is off, either expenses are too high or rents need adjusting.

Cash on cash return. This is your annual pre tax cash flow divided by the total cash you have invested in the deal. For BRRR deals where you refinance out most of your capital, cash on cash can look incredible on paper. But it is still the single best metric for comparing properties against each other and against alternative investments.

Equity position. This matters for exactly the decision you described: sell one to fund another, refi versus hold. You need to know current estimated value minus loan balance for each property. If you have $60K in equity sitting in a property returning 8% cash on cash, but you could 1031 into a deal returning 15%, that is a portfolio level decision you can only make if you can see the numbers side by side.

The problem with spreadsheets (and I say this having built several elaborate ones) is that they go stale. You update them when you remember, which means the numbers you are looking at are often 2 or 3 months behind reality. Your PM raised a fee, insurance renewed at a higher rate, you had an unexpected repair. By the time you update everything, you are making decisions on old data.

QuickBooks and Xero can handle the accounting side, but they don't give you portfolio level visibility. They will tell you income and expenses per property, but they won't show you cash on cash, equity position, or help you compare properties side by side for hold versus sell decisions. You end up exporting to a spreadsheet anyway for the analysis layer.

What I found is that the real gap is between the accounting (which tracks what happened) and the portfolio intelligence (which tells you what to do about it). Most landlords are stuck building that intelligence layer manually in spreadsheets that break every time they add a property or change an assumption. The investors I know who scale past 10 doors all eventually build or find systems that give them real time visibility across the entire portfolio without manual data entry every month.

Markus Shobe · Answer

You need accounting software such as Quickbooks or Xero to track your properties inflows and outflows. Both of these software's will let you run reports by doors to see how each one is doing. Once you get to that many doors using spreadsheets is not the best way.

Randall Alan · Answer

@Finnegan McDonnell

Hi Finnegan,

I would recommend one thing you check out is the concept of "Return on Equity."  The idea basically comes down to what is the best use of the stored equity in your property.  The higher the stored equity, the more likely it is that you can access that equity (one way or another) to leverage it to make more money than letting it sit in the property. (very much laymen's terms there).

Beyond that, a lot comes down to a lot of individual variables.  Do you have a low or high interest rate? Should you refi, pay it off, or sell it?  How much equity do you have drives the question of how much would you cash out if you did sell it or borrowed against it?.

Then there is the question of what is your use of the cash going forward?  For us, we sold a property and paid off 2 other properties with higher interest rates from the proceeds, sending our cash flow on the 2 newly paid off properties skyrocketing from $300 to $800-1000/month. We literally GAINED cash flow by selling a property and reducing our debt on the other 2 we paid off!   So it really depends on your objectives.  I don't know of a piece of software that will collectively do that.  There are plenty of spreadsheets that will pick-away at the question... but I think it really starts off with the question of "What is your personal objective?"  Do you want to build your portfolio?  Do you want to build your cash-flow?  Do you want to cash out and do something else with the money, etc?  Your higher interest rate properties and highest equity properties are usually your best opportunities to make something good happen.

I built a big spreadsheet that tracks all of my properties... Everything from purchase price, to interest rate, to taxes, insurance, rental income/sq ft, $/door after PITI, $/property after PITI, as well as tracking insurance policy numbers, etc.  It's really just how we track our properties so I have 1 place to look for whatever it is I need to know.  I even put return on equity, and market values into it across time.  It's nothing that is so fancy that anyone that has a basic understanding of Excel couldn't do.  Whenever we sell a property, we move that property to the bottom of the spreadsheet to subtract it from our calculated fields for our portfolio - but helps to have it still around to be able to reference later on - like when it's tax time, etc.

Part of the spreadsheet starts with Gross rents for the property, and then starts subtracting everything off of that from taxes, insurance, repair reserve, etc until I get down to a broad NOI of each property.  The spreadsheet also helps me understand how much I need to escrow for taxes and insurance premiums for properties that are free and clear (since the bank isn't collecting those monies any more.)  Those figures constantly gets updated every time a policy renews, or taxes change. Each month we auto-transfer money to escrow accounts so that when it's time to write a $50,000 check for property taxes, or pay 30 insurance policies across the year the money is already sitting there from the monthly deposits going into it.  There is also a separate escrow for repairs & maintenance.

Hope a little of it helps!

Randy

How are you actually tracking your portfolio performance across all your properties?

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