Zillow and other online estimates are usually not accurate.

You mentioned that credit repair has nothing to do with real estate, thats not entirely accurate.

But assuming fairly reasonable rates, you should have plenty more than $1,500 a month in savings.Maybe these figures aren't accurate for you.  

I'm assuming I should have some buyers in mind before even attempting to sign a contract with a seller; am I accurate?

Hey Simon,I'm building a tool that does pretty much what you describe, to automate what I'm doing in spredsheets.http://www.reikit.com/compsIt uses zillow/google maps data for lookups, but I use it with my own comps that I got from my realtor, then I run my own adjustments to get an accurate ARV.It's still early days, but check it out and let me know what you think.  

And I still haven't found the lists to always be accurate regarding equity.  

Higher returns (over 8% caps) ...This is simply not accurate. 

When looking at a possible property to invest in, sometime the pro-forma provided doesn't show accurate information.

We take the time to fill them out as accurately as possible so we pretty much know what we are spending.

If I had an accurate picture of the sellers actual expenses, the NOI would be higher, as I know they weren't spending much on it, but they couldn't have been making much profit, so the cap rate would still be really low.