Best Real Estate Investment Analysis Software

[Will E.]

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?

[Keenan Jenkins]

i am sorry i am new to bigger pockets this thread is old and just happened to do a google search to bring me here. But the man asked for software recomendations why is every comment everything but a software recomendation? The man didn't ask about coding a new software. He didn't ask about understanding the fundamentals of deal anaylsis. He asked for a software that if you input certain "raw data" it will be able to process the necessary formulas to give you what you need to know. It may even prompt you to input missing information. This is the purpose of software. Are you going to tell a construction estimator they are supposed to code their own software? No! So why would you do it here?