Looking for feedback on an approach on foreclosure forecasting

[Derek L.]

Good evening everyone, I'm new to BP, have been considering real estate as an investment for the better part of the last decade, and am in a place now where I'm committed to taking action in the next 6 months to get started. I've been a landlord before and have bought and sold a primary residence, so while I'm not totally new to transacting / managing real estate, I also don't claim to be an expert. 

Right now I'm learning more about the foreclosure market in DFW and would like some feedback on a model I put together (linked below) to estimate the rental income potential and rough ARV of houses going to auction. I'd like to know if this is a viable approach for narrowing down a list of foreclosures to a smaller list of properties that might meet my criteria and are worth a deeper look. I'm sure the approach ignores several things I was hoping to get some guidance on (property condition / rehab costs, other transaction expenses, property age, etc.).

The spreadsheet was put together starting with a list of properties going to auction. I then pull the average rent per sq ft for similar configurations for DFW zip codes as well as sold price per sq ft (from Zillow Research) and used those figures to estimate the monthly rent and rough ARV comp. After spot checking a few against other public listing sources, the rent and ARV estimates are at least in the right ballpark. The last few columns are meant to help sort the list to find the best combination of low starting auction price and best rent potential.

A few other questions I have: Besides attending the auction in person, is there any reliable way of finding out what the properties ultimately sold for? I realize Texas is a non-disclosure state, so the information isn't always available, just curious. Are the starting bids usually set by the trustee that's selling them? Any rule of thumb for how they come up with that figure? I can only assume the final sale price would be some discount from the ARV equal to the rough rehab costs that backs into a reasonable rental or sale return. The variability in sale price would have to be driven by how those costs are arrived at and how cost efficiently a given investor would be able to complete the work for to either secure a tenant or flip for an acceptable margin.

I've linked the spreadsheet below and would like to get your reactions to it as well as any other feedback on material inputs that you would add to help in the estimation. Also, if there are better approaches for finding reasonable foreclosure deals, I'm all ears and am interested in talking to anyone that's had success in DFW as well as making myself a resource.

Hope everyone has a great evening.

Spreadsheet Link