Best Real Estate Investment Analysis Software
I am looking for real estate investment analysis software that will work well for a beginner, but has enough depth that it will serve me well as I become more knowledgeable and gain multiple properties. I'm starting with single family homes for rent. To put a scope on this, I want software to analyze the purchase or sale of the home. I am not asking in this thread about administrative applications, contact managers, tax software, etc.
I use Microsoft Windows, and after some review of the market, I bought Realty Analytic's software. It looks great, unfortunately it only works on older versions of Excel. I'm trying to find an older Excel to install, but in the meantime I am willing to consider other products. Realty Analytics posts no phone number, and they never respond to any email inquiry.
Another product I bookmarked that looked good was Proapod "Executive 10". I went with that version (they have three levels and Executive 10 is the highest) because I want to consider all of the tax aspects as well as the time value of money.
I am sure I do not know enough yet to even know what I need to ask for. Having said that, I want software that is extremely good at calculating internal rates of return on the investment over its full life cycle. I want to understand cash on cash returns over time. I want to test different assumptions for home appreciation over time, and I also want to test assumptions about inflation rates (those are different things in some cases, as when home prices go up by 40% in two years due to limited supply in a low-inflation-rate environment).
I understand that many experienced investors use nothing but Excel. It might be that the software I am buying is simply training wheels for using Excel alone, but I suspect that well done software will save me a lot of time in developing my own Excel templates.
I would like to spend under $300 for the software.
What are my best options?