Small time investor with a tech background

[Thomas Slaymaker]

I’m a small-time buy-and-hold investor with a technical background, and I’ve been lurking here for a short while, learning from all of you and slowly trying to grow my little portfolio. I’m based in Alabama and, I started with spreadsheets for financial analysis and many browser tabs open... trying to figure out the school quality, factors that would attract renters, stuff like that.... rental comps etc... , then trying to mash all of that into a halfway decent analysis. As a small time investor I'm really timid to select a deal... what if I get it wrong?? So I wanted a second opinion. 

Because my day job is in tech, I eventually gave in to the itch to "just build something" to make my own life easier. Over the last little while, I've been working on a tool for myself that takes a property address and some basic financing terms, pulls in data (schools, crime, rents, comps, etc.), and then runs the numbers for investment metrics like IRR, cap rate, cash flow, DSCR into a simple 10-year view with a rough Buy / Pass style recommendation. I originally built it purely for my own use, but after showing it to a few friends and coworkers who invest, they pushed me to see if it might actually help other small investors too.

I’m definitely not here to hard sell anything, but I am trying to get honest feedback from real investors who live this stuff. If you’re a smaller investor who’s tired of wrestling with spreadsheets and want to poke at what I’ve built, I’d love to share it, hear what’s confusing, what’s useful, and what’s just plain bad. If that sounds interesting, feel free to DM me and I'll share the tool with you.

Here is a preview of what some of the output looks like:

[Joshua Hardin]

Hi Thomas,

Welcome - Glad to have you in the community!

-Sarge