Have any of you built your portfolio on Excel 2016?
You can place addresses in an address column, add notes, pricing and dates within the sheet to track lots of information. Then use the 3D map tool to overlay them on the planet using Bing Maps.
In addition, you can tell Bing maps (which I honestly hate, but Excel bests Google Fusion in usability) to color code each placemark. In addition to that, I cycle out the altitude of the placemark by median price, last sold price, last sold date (by converting the date to a number), number of days to rehab, etc so I can see and judge each property on a map by different metrices. This means there will be a square on top your properties, then that square will turn into a rectangular column jutting from the ground into the air, how high is determined by what value you want it to be. I make the sale price into feet. So if the last sale price, as registered by the clerk, is 200k then the column is that many feet high. It may sound high, but it's really not, you'll be at like 500k feet just to see a major metropolitan area.
If this is confusing to you, just take a few things away. Right now you are probably writing down prospective and current properties on a word document, an actual sheet of paper or a spreadsheet. You are using this as recording tool, versus an actual analysis tool. You are making your brain into an analysis tool. Your analyses and thoughts are fleeting and you can lose fidelity. You can probably handle 10-15 properties in your mind at once if you're really good. My spreadsheet currently has 300,000 properties, which I've filtered out to 30,000 then down to 3,000. It's these 3,000 that I overlay over my region of choice.
Also, I'll comment on automating your data needs soon.
-KenFusion
