It was an owner financed deal and we literally wrote our contract out on paper napkin over some beers-he was an odd dude who demanded we meet at his house and that I bring him a 12 pack before we talked business. 

Of course, in most areas you can literally draw up the terms on a napkin and submit the signed agreement to a title company, but using your local approved purchase contract is often the easiest, along with local disclosure forms. 

"Maintain in good and safe working order and promptly repair all electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and other facilities and appliances supplied or required to be supplied by the landlord provided that notification of needed repairs is made to the landlord in writing by the tenant..."

I was going to raise it , but it is 6 inches from the driveway , it would either get hit or run over and crushed , It is the old style , a steel pipe with whats called a sanitary seal ( a big rubber plug in the 4 in steel with a compression fitting for the pipe no worries about contamination ) .

This is why I prefer to write my own contracts. you dont have to be a lawyer to write them up, there are plenty of examples out there that can help. they dont need to be huge, even the back of a napkin can be contractually binding if enough detail is provided. just a couple pages, im sure once you read some examples you will enjoy writing it. then when you have a good one written up you can always reuse, just need to change the "Scope" section of the contract. one thing ive noticed, keep the contracts short, too many pages simply scares off small time contractors and really it only needs to be a couple pages to be covered for most residential projects.

If you are remotely interested in that, just buy going to the auctions, you will learn a lot.Back of the napkin calculation:ARV = 260k.Profit = 5kRepairs = 25k.

I felt bad because they have little kids and it was far from sanitary (and they're current on their rent) so I told him to go ahead and snake it out once more on my dime, hopefully they learned a lesson this time (probably not).

Scribbling something on a napkin or twisting existing agreements you had with full-blown investors into new JVs is fraught with risk.

Ali, I just read your article about crunching the numbers on a napkin...priceless.

I don't know anything about the software, but when it comes to analyzing rehab deals, it's as basic as the following formula:Profit = ARV - Purchase Price - Rehab Costs - Fixed CostsIf you know 4 of the 5 variables, you can rearrange the formula to determine the other one (for example, to know your max offer, your max rehab budget, etc).My guess is that this software (or any software that allows you to analyze a rehab deal) basically just puts a user interface around that formula, and spits out some additional ROI metrics on top of it.It's nothing you can't do in Excel or on the back of a napkin.