All Forum Posts by: Joe Henry

@Christian Costa, the number from B41 should be a negative value. If you enter a percentage for management you'll see the calculated management cost is a negative number because it's an expense. All the other expenses you enter should be negative numbers, not positive, which will make B41 a negative number.

If you use the form this way the NOI formula is correct. If you like using positive numbers for the expenses though that's fine (it is easier to enter positive numbers there), and then you could change your formula for NOI to what you posted above.

Thanks for asking though, hope you get some use from the spreadsheet.

@Michaela G., I don't know why you are insinuating feelings. But I do appreciate your thoughts on my original question regardless, so thank you.

I just went to one of these the other day. They gave a lot of misinformation about how tax liens and tax deed purchasing works. They try to make it sound very difficult for you to pursue by yourself. Here in Duval County, the county makes it very easy - everything is done online.

Then they try to sell you on purchasing a 1k membership to their club, which is usually like 2k or something, and you can only get the deal that day! Turns out you can go to any of their other seminars and get the same exact 1k deal.

I wouldn't recommend doing it, ask you can get a great education from books, real relationships and networking, and online. But if you do do it, don't worry about the "deals" they offer. Go home afterward and do your homework to see if what they said is true.

I would also argue that it does matter what prices were 10 or 15 years ago. If you know that a property was purchased for 100k during the height of the bubble, and a seller is asking 100k now, you are most likely overpaying - maybe not overpaying by market price, but by true value, yes.

This is not how successful investors make their money - they don't buy good deals for the market, they buy good deals, period. Deals that are judged good by true value.

@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.