All Forum Posts by: Joe Henry

@Michaela G.,

this has nothing to do with computers. It simply stands to reason that if a buyer paid fair price (fair market price) sometime in the history of the market, and you know the historical values of the market and where the market is now, then you can use that to calculate fair price now. Of course there are other factors (home improvements, etc), but this is just a general estimate. This is simple math.

I do not consider finding the fair market value of a property a waste of time. If you do, you are welcome to purchase properties without knowing that. I know about comps, but I'm asking for something different in this particular thread, for my own reasons.

@Gordon Cuffe, thanks! I will ask my agent then.

@Michaela G., well I agree with you, that's why I was asking about home values by neighborhood ;)

@Michaela G., that makes sense, but is not how I'm trying to use the data. If I can see that someone paid 100k in 2008, and that the market now is comparable to say the market in 2004, and the prices rose 40% from 2004 to 2008, then I can come to the conclusion that the house now is probably worth more like 60k.

Just like the title says, I'm trying to find a chart of average home values going back to at least 2000, by neighborhood if possible. Zillow doesn't usually go back that far and often is only by city.

Any tips on where to find this data?

The purpose of this is to compare asking prices with where the market is now to what the seller paid when they bought the property.

@James Stevens, the Capital Expenditures tab is for all the repair costs. It is much, much more thorough than the BP calculator (breaking down costs into ~200+ categories, vs BPs 24 basic categories). Same with the closing costs tab in the spreadsheet - much more thorough.

Also the inputs for the financing are much more flexible than the BP calculator. e.g. BP won't even let me enter my own loan interest rate, I have to pick from a very small list, with 3.5% being the lowest selectable value. 

In the excel file, I can just copy and paste column B from the Deal Evaluation tab into column C, D, etc... to create as many different financing variations as I want and compare all the numbers (cap rate, CoC, etc) for each variation right in one view, something that is impossible using the online tool.

Also BP only lets you make 4 or 5 reports if you're not a pro member, and you can't print them if you're not pro.

Also using the site means you have to have a solid internet connection.

In case it wasn't clear, there are 3 tabs in the spreadsheet, "Deal Evaluation", "Closing Costs", and "Capital Expenditures". First is "Deal Evaluation", where you can calculate your monthly numbers, and compare different ways to finance the deal. Rows 19 and 20 of the "Deal Evaluation" sheet are called "Closing Costs" and "Capital Expenditures", which use the totals that are automatically generated for you from the other two sheets. 

So if you enter some repairs needed in the "Capital Expenditures" sheet, they automatically show up as up-front all-in costs on the "Deal Evaluation" sheet. Same with the "Closing Costs" sheet.

I don't mean to hate on the BP calculator, its just that excel was built for this kind of thing, and so the features provided are going to be much better.

I spent some time combining 4 or 5 other spreadsheets that do things like calculate your mortgage payments with various financing options, calculate your cap ex, and calculate your cash flow, GSI, GOI, NOI, CoC, etc.

I think it's pretty cool but there are probably more sophisticated sheets out there. I tried to keep this simple, focusing on just the numbers you want to see.

Hopefully it will not only be useful to myself, but others too, so I've uploaded it to the File Place.

I'd be thrilled to get some feedback on it as well. Are there things I can improve or that would be useful to see? Errors, omissions, etc?

Here's the link: Deal Evaluation - Mortgage Varriations, Cap Ex, Closing Costs

Thanks for all the input guys. I think leaving it how it is is probably the best way to go, unless I can do something really creative to not have to move the pluming around much.

I'm evaluating a 1200 sq ft single story house on a slab. It's got 4 bedrooms crammed in, making the master bedroom no bigger than the others, and also only allowing ~ 6 x 6 master bathroom.

I'd like to make it a 3 bedroom, give each bedroom more room, the master would have a much bigger bathroom and maybe a walk-in closet. But this would require moving 1 or maybe 2 bathrooms, also maybe moving the kitchen a few feet over.

Assume the full rework costs 60k, vs just cosmetic work costing around 35k.

This is a buy and hold, so do you think it would be worth it in the long run to change the layout?

Does a layout change like this come with a significantly higher rent price in your market? It's a family neighborhood, B maybe B+ type area. 

Have you ever had trouble renting a place with a weird layout? What is your usual decision in situations like this? Rentability or rehab budget?

@David Hines, also good points. What system do you use for your electronic payments?