Deal Simulator

Play out a rental deal, month by month

Acquire one property, hold it, advance time, and watch cash flow, equity, debt, and net worth move together, before any real money is at stake. No account needed.

Choose a way in

Start instantly with a fictional example, search a real CE market, or enter three numbers of your own. Everything else is a clearly labeled, editable default.

Fast start: a fictional sample deal

    Common questions

    Is this simulator using real market data?

    It can. "Use a CE market" starts a deal from a real U.S. city's typical home value, typical rent, vacancy rate and an estimated property tax, each labeled with its own source (Zillow or Census ACS) and as-of date. Those figures describe the market as a whole, not any specific listing, and are not a forecast: past growth rates are offered only as an explicit, opt-in "repeat the historical rate" scenario, never applied automatically. The fast-start scenario is entirely fictional: a made-up property in a made-up place. When you enter your own numbers, every figure you don't type in gets a clearly labeled, editable default (a conventional 20% down payment, 6.5% assumed rate, and so on), never a number silently pulled from any real listing or market. Growth assumptions default to an explicit 0% in every mode unless you type a rate or opt into a market's historical one.

    What exactly does "advance time" do?

    Each month the simulator runs the same ten-step accounting order a real rental goes through: rent is collected net of vacancy, operating expenses and the mortgage payment are paid, any planned CapEx reserve contribution moves, and the results are recorded. Advancing 12 months runs that process twelve times in a row and shows you where you land.

    What happens if the numbers don't work?

    The simulator never quietly lets a property go into negative cash. If a required payment can't be covered by your unrestricted cash, it stops and tells you exactly what was needed and what was available, the same way the underlying engine would refuse a real shortfall. That's most likely to show up when acquiring: lower the purchase price, raise your starting cash, or adjust the down payment and reserve defaults under Financing and Reserves.

    Why do rent and value only change once a year?

    Real leases renew annually, not continuously, and a real appraisal or assessment is a point-in-time event, so growth applies once a year, on the anniversary of when the property was acquired, compounding on whatever the number has become by then rather than smoothing it out every month.

    Can I track more than one property?

    Not yet in this first version. It's deliberately one property at a time, whether it started from a CE market, the fictional example, or your own numbers. Saving a simulation to your account and a full multi-property portfolio view are on the roadmap.

    What does a market's "typical" value and rent actually mean?

    They're market-wide aggregates for that city (typical home value and typical asking or median rent across every home there), not comparable sales or rent for any one address. A market missing enough data for a reliable estimate simply won't come up in the search. Where a market has some but not all of the four starting figures, the page says exactly which are missing and lets you type your own or accept a labeled generic default instead of guessing on your behalf.