How It Works
Your First Rental Analysis
A short, guided introduction to researching a property, exploring the numbers, and saving your analysis.
Read The Video Transcript
A Clearer View Of Your Next Property
Welcome to ProformaPilot. Let’s turn a property you’re considering into a clearer picture of its income, costs, and potential.
Start With Your Property Type
Start with Rental Analysis, and choose your property type: a house, multi-family property, condo, or home with an ADU—an accessory dwelling unit.
Enter The Property Address
Type the address, or choose an address suggestion. Then use Look Up Property to request available property details, rent estimates, and comparable rentals.
Review Before You Apply
Review the results before applying them. Choose the values you want, or use Select All, then Apply Selected Values. Estimates are a starting point. Check them against what you know about the property.
One Step At A Time
Follow the guided steps for rental income, purchase price, financing, and expenses. You can also explore a possible refinance, or skip that step.
Understand What Remains
Your analysis shows projected monthly cash flow: what remains after the modeled expenses and loan payments. You’ll also see the cash required and estimated returns.
Build Your Understanding
For unfamiliar terms, hover over the small information symbols, or tap them to open the glossary. Try different assumptions to see how your results change.
Know What Uses Your Allowance
Exploring calculations uses no Property Checks. A fresh lookup uses one Property Check, and saving a version uses one Analysis Save.
Keep A Record Of Your Thinking
Review your inputs, save your analysis, and open your report.
Your First Step Starts Here
New to investing? Start with Try An Example. ProformaPilot helps you ask better questions before taking the next step.
For more guided examples, explore our Learning Guides.
New to investing terms? Open The Investing Glossary (opens in a new tab). Hover over a raised “i” for a quick explanation.Tap a raised “i” for its definition in a new tab.
Calculation Boundary
ProformaPilot uses deterministic code for financial calculations. No language model creates or changes purchase price, rent, NOI, debt service, DSCR, refinance proceeds, cash flow, return, score, or maximum-offer results.
Explore The Full ProformaPilot Toolkit →
Financing, First-Year Planning, & Living In The Property
Rental Analysis includes optional fixed-rate financing comparisons. Enter a common purchase closing budget excluding lender costs, then enter loan points, lender fees, credits, and mortgage insurance separately. Compare interest, mortgage insurance, and closing costs over the same period, alongside principal repaid and debt remaining. Applying an option replaces purchase terms and total closing costs; fees are counted once. Rates are note rates, not APR. No adjustable rates, future refinancing, changing mortgage insurance, tax benefits, or returns on cash are assumed. For context, read the CFPB guide to comparing loan estimates.
The first-year forecast uses the selected first ownership month and 12 full calendar months. Explicit rent periods replace generic vacancy; periods for the same dwelling cannot overlap. Other income continues monthly, ownership costs and debt payments run for all 12 months, and additional turnover costs occur in the entered month. Initial acquisition, repair, and holding costs remain in upfront cash and are not deducted again. Reserve contributions use either the applied fixed plan or a percentage of collected income. The suggested cash buffer equals the largest cumulative modeled operating deficit, before using available cash. Deposits, partial-month proration, bad debt, income-tax effects, and future refinancing are excluded.
Live-In Rental Analysis removes included rent for one existing owner-occupied dwelling, keeps other rental income and whole-property costs, and shows net monthly housing cost. Management, maintenance, and percentage reserves follow the remaining income after vacancy. The optional comparison with current housing cost is a personal budget measure. Personal housing savings are not added to rental returns. This scenario is independent of the first-year plan. Confirm owner-occupied lending, insurance, occupancy, permits, and rental eligibility separately.
Income And Expenses
Effective gross income begins with selected monthly rent and other income, annualizes them, and applies vacancy. Operating expenses include management, maintenance, property tax, insurance, HOA, owner-paid utilities, and other recurring expenses. Residential Rental Analysis shows NOI before capital reserves, then subtracts reserves and debt service to calculate cash flow. The renovation-and-refinance model includes capital reserves in its expense allowance before calculating NOI. Each report identifies its model.
Post-Purchase Property Taxes
The seller’s recorded bill and your buyer’s estimate are kept separately. In the Expenses step, you can estimate a full year of taxes from purchase price or an entered taxable value, a reviewed local rate, and direct assessments. California’s 1% base is a starting point; local bond rates and assessments must be added. Other locations require local assessor information. Purchase price is a valuation assumption, and reassessment rules, exclusions, and exemptions need independent verification.
An estimate changes the analysis only after you review and apply it. Purchase-linked estimates follow price changes in scenarios and price calculators. Fixed taxable values stay fixed. Changing the property address pauses the estimate. Closing prorations and supplemental bill timing are separate from this steady-state annual estimate. See California’s assessment guidance.
Major Repairs And Replacement Reserves
The Expenses step can plan for named replacements using costs today, whole years until needed, annual cost growth, and a starting reserve. The planner finds a uniform monthly contribution sufficient for every entered deadline. It assumes year-end spending, no reserve interest, and only the first replacement of each item; it is not a lifetime maintenance forecast.
Applying the plan replaces the percentage-based capital reserve. Replacement spending is funded by that reserve and is not deducted again from cash flow. A starting balance counts toward upfront cash; in Rental Analysis, it is included within the initial cash reserve without counting the same money twice. Immediate repairs belong in the initial repair budget. Editing the schedule or changing the property pauses its use until you apply it again.
What Price Works?
Residential Rental Analysis can solve for a purchase price that meets your monthly cash-flow goal, break-even rent, and rent needed for that goal at your current price. It uses the same purchase financing, vacancy, operating costs, and reserves as your analysis. Rent thresholds combine the included dwellings, while other income stays unchanged. Optional future refinancing is excluded.
These are financial thresholds, not market valuations or seller-acceptance predictions. With an all-cash purchase and fixed taxes, price alone cannot change monthly cash flow. Purchase-linked taxes do change with price. Applying a calculated price updates your working assumptions; save a new version to preserve it. Exploring the tools uses no Analysis Saves or Property Checks.
Main Home And Accessory Dwellings
An optional dwelling schedule replaces combined unit, size, and rent inputs. Each included dwelling contributes its selected market or local PHA rent; excluded dwellings contribute no rent. Unknown physical details remain unknown, and combined size totals include only entered values. Planned dwellings and future income are identified separately from existing units.
Additional dwelling build budgets are added to shared rehabilitation costs before the same contingency rate is applied. Additional monthly owner expenses are added to shared operating expenses. These costs remain in the model when a dwelling’s rent is excluded. ARV and financing are whole-property assumptions. Scenario rent and rehabilitation adjustments apply to every dwelling as well as shared costs. Results describe stabilized operation; construction timing is not modeled. The separate Lease & First-Year Cash Flow tool models full-month rent periods and turnover costs; its results do not replace stabilized returns. Users must include expected carrying costs in their holding assumptions.
Permanent Debt
The projected refinance is the lower of the ARV/LTV maximum and the principal supported by NOI at the target DSCR, stated interest rate, and amortization term. When NOI is not positive, the DSCR-supported refinance amount is zero.
Maximum Offer
Three purchase-price constraints are evaluated: equity protection, target cap rate on total project cost, and maximum capital remaining after refinance. The recommendation is the lowest of the three active constraints. Fixed-cost ceilings are solved algebraically. When an applied tax estimate follows price, taxes and supported refinance proceeds are evaluated at the candidate price; the capital-recovery ceiling uses a bounded numerical solution. The seller asking price and your proposed purchase price do not set these investment limits.
This is an investment-target test, not a market valuation or a prediction of seller acceptance. A low limit can reflect demanding return or capital-recovery targets even when a home's asking price is supported by comparable sales. For an ordinary rental purchase without a renovation-and-refinance strategy, use Rental Analysis.
Three Offer Scenarios
Conservative reduces rent by 10% and ARV by 8%, raises renovation costs by 15%, and adds 2 percentage points of vacancy and 0.75 percentage points of refinance interest. Balanced uses your entered assumptions. Competitive increases rent and ARV by 5%, reduces renovation costs by 5%, and subtracts 1 percentage point of vacancy and 0.25 percentage points of refinance interest. Vacancy is bounded between 0% and 95%; interest cannot fall below zero. All three retain your investment targets.
The higher scenario depends on favorable assumptions; it is not a more probable market price. A zero ceiling is shown as “No Fit,” meaning no positive purchase price meets that scenario's targets. Scenario cash flow is calculated at your entered purchase price.
Scenarios And Score
Conservative and optimistic scenarios change rent, vacancy, rehabilitation cost, ARV, and refinance rate using disclosed, deterministic adjustments. The score combines cash flow, DSCR, cap rate, equity cushion, capital recovery, and stated data confidence, followed by explicit penalties.
Required Verification
Users must independently verify ownership, title, property condition, permits, zoning, rent comparables, local payment standards, utility allowances, taxes, insurance, financing, rehabilitation costs, value comparables, and all legal or regulatory requirements.