Quote from @Yuanmo Lei: Hey everyone — I’m a techie and small investor designing a tool to make deal analysis less painful for people like us.I’d love to learn from you:- How do you currently find and analyze your properties?

Any lender, financing, or deal analysis tips that helped you early on?

If anyone is open to mentoring or sharing guidance on deal analysis, I’d love to connect and learn from you.Looking forward to being part of this amazing community and growing together!

You'll also want a licensed servicer to service them for you.

A few key things you’ll want to focus on are:RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) – the core metric for valuing operations.Occupancy trends and ADR (Average Daily Rate) – these drive your revenue projections.Expense ratio and management structure – smaller motels can run at 40–50% expenses, while flagged hotels can be much leaner with scale.CapEx and reposition potential – if it’s a rehab, understanding brand standards and conversion costs (for example, turning an independent motel into a soft-branded flag) can make or break the deal.My partner and I have underwritten several hotel/motel projects in the Los Angeles area, so I’m happy to share some insight into how we typically structure the analysis and what lenders look for in this space.

You also want to make sure you protect your downside in the case regulations do emerge down the line, by looking at the Mid Term and Long Term Rental rates on the property as well to make sure it is something you could live with in the case there was a change.With the amount of Airbnb listings continuing to grow rapidly, it is become increasingly more important to provide a quality service to make your property stand out among the rest.

Since we want to be conservative with our underwriting, we found the county’s Property Tax Estimator tool: https://cuyahogacounty.gov/fiscal-officer/departments/budget...Our current thought process:-Look up the correct tax district and current value from county records-Enter the property’s purchase price as the new market value in the estimator-Use the 2026 estimated tax amount for deal analysis, since that’s likely closer to where taxes will eventually adjustFor those of you investing in Cleveland:-Does this approach make sense?

I originally planned to just replace the roof and service the HVAC.

Any and all help is appreciated.It is scary to get into this without knowing if it would be a good investment, but I want to jump right in now as I have had analysis paralysis for almost 5 years.Thanks,Daksh Hi Daksh, realtor and short-term rental owner in the high desert here.

I've also spoken to a few services popular here on BP.