The real estate terminal

A plain-language guide to every number the terminal calculates.

You don't need this to use the software. You need it to defend the software's answers in a room with a lender, a partner, or an investor — which is a different and harder job.

Each entry gives you four things: what the number means, how it's calculated here, what a good one looks like, and the mistake people make with it. That last part is usually the valuable one.

Every formula below is the formula the terminal actually runs. Where the industry uses a term loosely, this document says which definition we picked.

1The money going in

Purchase price

What you pay the seller. Not what you spend.

Closing costs

Title, legal, lender fees, transfer taxes. Typically 2–4% of purchase price. Real money that never shows up in the sale price you quote at a party.

Rehab budget

What you'll spend to make the property produce the rent you're projecting. If your rent assumption depends on a renovation, that renovation belongs here.

Total basis

Purchase price + Closing costs + Rehab

What the deal actually costs you, all in. Every return in this document is measured against basis or against equity — never against purchase price alone.

Loan amount and LTV

LTV (loan-to-value) is the share of the purchase price the lender puts up.

Loan amount = Purchase price × LTV
Down payment = Purchase price − Loan amount

Note the lender lends against the price, not your basis. Closing costs and rehab come out of your pocket.

Equity / capital required

Down payment + Closing costs + Rehab

The cash that has to leave your account before this thing produces a dollar. This is the denominator of cash-on-cash, and the number an investor is actually being asked to write.

2From rent to what you keep

This chain is the spine of every income property. The terminal draws it as a waterfall for a reason: each step is a place money leaves.

Gross scheduled rent

Every unit, fully rented, twelve months. A number that will never happen.

Vacancy allowance

The share of gross rent you won't collect — turnover, downtime, non-payment. 5% is the common default; a tight submarket might justify 3%, a rough one 8%+.

Vacancy loss = Gross scheduled rent × Vacancy rate

Effective gross income (EGI)

Gross scheduled rent − Vacancy loss + Other income

What you actually collect. "Other income" is laundry, parking, storage, pet fees — small, real, and frequently forgotten.

Operating expenses (opex)

Taxes, insurance, management, maintenance, utilities you pay, HOA, reserves.

What is NOT opex: the mortgage. Debt service is not an operating expense. Keeping them separate is what makes NOI comparable between a property you financed and one you bought cash.

Net operating income (NOI)

EGI − Operating expenses

The single most important number in income real estate. It's the property's earnings, independent of how you paid for it. Two buyers with different loans looking at the same building compute the same NOI.

Annual debt service

Monthly mortgage payment × 12

Principal and interest. Not taxes and insurance — those are already in opex, and counting them twice is a common and expensive error.

Cash flow

NOI − Annual debt service

What lands in your account. Positive is the floor, not the goal.

3The four numbers that decide a rental

Cap rate

Cap rate = NOI ÷ Purchase price

The unlevered yield. What the property earns as a percentage of its price, before any loan. It's how you compare a duplex to an apartment building to a strip mall on one axis.

Good: varies entirely by market. In South Florida, 5–6% is market, 7%+ is strong.

• On cost (NOI ÷ purchase price) — what the terminal shows when you're

underwriting a purchase. Your yield.

• On value (NOI ÷ current estimated value) — what the terminal shows for

a property you already own. The market's yield.

A property bought at a 7% cap that has appreciated 40% is now a 5% cap asset. Both are true. They answer different questions: the first asks "was this a good buy," the second asks "should this capital stay here."

Cash-on-cash return

Annual cash flow ÷ Total cash invested

The levered yield. What your actual money earns in year one.

Good: 8%+ is the target the terminal uses.

DSCR (debt service coverage ratio)

NOI ÷ Annual debt service

How many times over the property's earnings cover the loan payment. This is the lender's number. At 1.25x, NOI can fall 20% before you're paying the mortgage out of pocket.

Good: 1.25x is the standard floor. Below 1.20x most lenders decline. Below 1.0x the property does not pay for itself.

Monthly cash flow

Cash flow ÷ 12. The number you feel. Negative cash flow means the property is a bet on appreciation, which is a different and riskier investment than the one you think you're making.

How the terminal grades it

"Marginal" is not a rejection. It's the deal that becomes a Pass if you get the price down, the rate down, or the rent up — and the terminal tells you which.

4Multifamily additions

Everything above still applies. These are the numbers that only appear once there's more than one unit.

Unit mix

The rent roll by unit type — how many 1BRs at what rent, how many 2BRs at what rent. Gross scheduled rent is built from this rather than typed in, so a rent assumption is always attached to a specific unit.

Gross potential income (GPI)

Gross scheduled rent + Other income

Before vacancy. The top of the funnel.

Expense ratio

Operating expenses ÷ EGI

Opex as a share of collections. Good: 35–45% for most multifamily. Under 30% usually means something is missing from the expense list — reserves and management are the usual omissions.

Price per unit

Purchase price ÷ Total units

The fastest comparison between two buildings in the same submarket. Useless across submarkets.

GRM (gross rent multiplier)

Purchase price ÷ Annual gross scheduled rent

A rough screen. Lower is cheaper. It ignores expenses entirely, so it's for sorting a list of twenty properties, never for deciding on one.

5Time: what a hold is actually worth

The numbers above are all year-one snapshots. They can't tell you whether a 5% cap deal with strong rent growth beats a 7% cap deal in a flat market. For that you need a projection.

Hold period

How many years before you sell. The terminal defaults to 5.

Rent growth and expense growth

Annual increases applied to the projection. Defaults: 3% rent, 2.5% expenses. The gap matters more than either number — if expenses grow faster than rent, NOI shrinks every year and the exit gets worse.

Capex reserve

Money set aside annually for roofs, HVAC, and the things that don't break until they do. Default 3% of EGI. It reduces cash flow on paper and prevents a crisis in practice.

Exit cap rate

The cap rate you assume a buyer will pay when you sell.

Sale price = Forward NOI ÷ Exit cap rate

Default 6%.

This is the most powerful assumption in the entire model and the one you control least. A 5% exit cap versus a 7% exit cap changes the sale price by 40% on identical NOI. This is why the terminal shows a sensitivity matrix across exit caps rather than a single answer.

Costs of sale

Commissions and closing on the way out. Default 7%.

IRR (internal rate of return)

The annualized return that accounts for how much you get and when. A dollar in year one is worth more than a dollar in year five, and IRR is the only metric here that knows that.

• Levered IRR — the return on your equity, after debt. This is your number.
• Unlevered IRR — the return on the whole property basis, ignoring

financing. This is the property's number, and it's how you tell whether a good return came from a good building or just from cheap debt.

Good: 12–15%+ levered on a stabilized hold; developers want more.

Equity multiple

Total dollars back ÷ Total dollars in

2.0x means you doubled your money, whenever that happened. IRR tells you how fast; the multiple tells you how much. Neither is sufficient alone.

Payback year

The year cumulative cash flow alone has returned your equity — before any sale. A deal that pays you back in year four is a fundamentally different risk than one that only works if the exit does.

NPV (net present value)

Today's value of all future cash flows, discounted at your required rate (default 8%). Positive means the deal beats your hurdle. Mostly useful for comparing two deals of different sizes and shapes.

6Development

A development is not a purchase. You're not buying income, you're manufacturing it, and the numbers change accordingly.

The cost stack

Land + acquisition closing — the site, plus the cost of getting it.

Hard costs — the physical build.

Hard costs = (Buildable ft² × Cost per ft²) + Demolition

Demolition — teardown and abatement. A hard cost in its own right.

Soft costs — design, engineering, permits, fees, legal, insurance. Expressed as a percentage of the vertical build only, plus entitlement.

Entitlement — rezoning, impact studies, the cost of earning the right to build. A fixed pursuit cost, not a percentage of anything, so it sits on its own line.

Contingency — the budget for what you haven't thought of.

Contingency = (Vertical build + Demolition) × Contingency %

Good: 5% on a simple ground-up, 10%+ on a renovation or anything touching an existing structure. A developer who carries no contingency is carrying it in their equity instead.

Loan-to-cost (LTC)

Construction lenders size against cost, not value.

Loan = Cost before financing × LTC

Typically 60–70%. The rest is your equity, and unlike a purchase loan, it generally goes in first.

Interest reserve

Construction interest, capitalized into the loan.

Loan × Rate × (Months ÷ 12) × Average outstanding %

You don't draw the whole loan on day one — you draw as you build. The average outstanding percentage (typically ~60%) reflects that. This is real money and it grows every month the schedule slips.

Total development cost (TDC)

Land + Hard + Soft + Contingency + Interest reserve

All in.

Cost per ft²

TDC ÷ Buildable ft²

The number you compare to other projects and to what the market will pay per foot. If your all-in cost per foot approaches market sale price per foot, stop.

GDV (gross development value)

What the finished product sells for. The terminal derives it from market $/ft² × buildable area when you give it a per-foot number, because that's how a developer actually thinks — and because GDV should move when the building gets bigger.

Profit and margin — the sell exit

Net sale = GDV − Selling costs
Profit = Net sale − TDC
Margin on cost = Profit ÷ TDC

Good: developers typically target 15–20%+. Below 15% there isn't enough room between you and a bad surprise.

Return on equity and equity multiple

Return on equity = Profit ÷ Equity required
Equity multiple = (Equity + Profit) ÷ Equity

Margin on cost measures the project. Return on equity measures you — the same project with more leverage produces the same margin and a much larger return on equity, along with much larger risk.

The hold exit: yield on cost and development spread

If you're building to keep rather than to sell, profit isn't the test. The test is whether building beats buying.

Yield on cost = Stabilized NOI ÷ TDC
Development spread = Yield on cost − Market cap rate

Development spread is the whole argument for developing. If the market pays a 5.5% cap for finished product and you can build to a 7% yield on cost, you created 1.5 points of value that nobody sold you. If the spread is zero, you took two years of construction risk to buy at market — you should have just bought.

Note that spread is measured in percentage points, not percent. 7.0% against 5.5% is a spread of 1.5 points.

7Once you own it

Different questions apply to an asset you hold than to one you're buying.

Equity

Current estimated value − Loan balance

What's yours today. Grows from both paydown and appreciation.

Current LTV

Loan balance ÷ Current value

Leverage today, not at origination. This is what determines whether you can refinance and pull capital out.

Debt yield

NOI ÷ Loan balance

The lender's risk lens, and the one metric that can't be manipulated by interest rates or amortization. Good: 10%+.

Return on equity

Annual cash flow ÷ Current equity

The question nobody asks often enough: should this capital stay here? A property throwing $12k on $400k of trapped equity is earning 3%. It may have been a great buy. It's now a poor place to leave money.

Break-even occupancy

(Operating expenses + Debt service) ÷ Gross potential rent

How full the building must stay to cover everything. Good: below 85%. At 95% you have almost no margin for a bad quarter.

Appreciation

Total and annualized change against your purchase price. Real, but the least reliable of your returns — it's the one the market decides.

8Splitting the profit

When other people's money is in the deal, the returns have to be divided. The structure below is what a family office or institutional LP expects to see.

LP and GP

The LP (limited partner) is the investor: money in, passive, limited liability. The GP (general partner, or sponsor) finds the deal, executes it, and usually co-invests alongside the LP.

Pari passu

Latin for "on equal footing." Capital that ranks equally gets paid equally, pro-rata. In this model, the GP's co-invested dollars are treated exactly like the LP's for return of capital and preferred return — the sponsor's own money gets no special treatment.

Return of capital

Before anyone earns anything, everyone gets their money back. First claim on every distribution.

Preferred return ("the pref")

A minimum annual return to capital before the sponsor earns a promote. Typically 8%. It is not a guarantee — it's a queue position. In a bad deal, the pref simply goes unpaid.

Important: the pref accrues. A year that pays nothing doesn't erase the obligation; it carries forward and must be caught up before the sponsor sees promote dollars.

Promote (carried interest)

The sponsor's share of profit above the pref — payment for finding, structuring and executing the deal, as distinct from funding it. Typically 20%.

"80/20 over an 8% pref" means: capital gets its money back plus 8% a year, then everything beyond that splits 80% to the investor pool and 20% to the sponsor.

Hurdle and tiers

A hurdle is an IRR level at which the split changes. A tier is the band between two hurdles. A common structure:

The sponsor's take rises as the outcome improves. That's the point: it aligns the person running the deal with the people funding it.

The waterfall

The whole sequence, in order: return of capital → preferred return → tiered splits. Money fills each level before touching the next, like water.

How to read one: the number that matters to an investor is not the split percentage, it's what actually reaches them in dollars, and at what IRR. A generous-sounding 70/30 on a deal that clears its hurdles beats an 80/20 on one that doesn't.

9Risk

Every number in this document is one scenario. It is, specifically, the scenario least likely to happen — the base case is a single point on a distribution.

Sensitivity

Re-running the deal while moving the assumptions you're least sure about, and seeing where it stops working.

For a development: cost overrun against sale value. For a hold: exit cap rate against rent growth. Those pairs aren't arbitrary — they're the two variables in each deal type that you don't control and can't promise.

Break-even

The point at which profit reaches zero.

"Costs can run 27% over budget before the profit reaches zero."

This is the single most useful sentence you can put in front of an investor, because it converts an abstract projection into a margin of safety. It is also the sentence that keeps you honest: if the answer is 4%, you don't have a deal, you have a hope.

Margin of safety

The distance between your base case and the point of failure. Everything in this section exists to measure it. A deal with a 12% margin on cost and 30% of overrun tolerance is safer than one with 20% margin and 8% tolerance — and only sensitivity analysis will tell you that.

Quick reference

Targets are conventions, not laws. A 5% cap in a supply-constrained submarket with 6% rent growth can beat an 8% cap where nothing is growing. The metrics tell you what a deal is; judgment tells you whether that's the deal you want.

Figures produced by this software are estimates based on the assumptions you enter. They are not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

What every part of the terminal does, and why it's there.

This is a tour, not a reference. Each entry is short on purpose — you'll understand any of these faster by opening it than by reading about it. For the meaning of the numbers themselves, see Financial Concepts.

The tour follows a deal's life: find it, underwrite it, build it, own it, report on it, raise against it.

Public — no account needed

Underwriting tool · /tool

Three modes on one screen: single rental, multifamily, and ground-up construction. Enter a deal, get a verdict — Pass, Marginal, or Fail — with the metrics behind it.

Market heat map · /markets

South Florida appreciation by ZIP code, painted across the tri-county area. Built on FHFA house-price-index growth rates.

Pulse · /pulse

A published newsletter — macro context, market notes, and selected deals.

The desk

Dashboard · /account

Portfolio value, equity, income and allocation, drawn rather than tabulated. Alerts surface what needs attention.

Saved analyses · /account/underwriting

Every deal you've underwritten, kept. Reopen, compare, share.

Underwriting

The three modes

Rental for a single income property. Multifamily adds a unit-mix editor so rent is built from real units rather than typed as a total. Construction models a build instead of a purchase.

Verdict badge

Pass / Marginal / Fail against DSCR, cash-on-cash and cash flow — with guidance on what would move a Marginal into a Pass.

Multi-year pro forma

Projects the hold: rent and expense growth, capex reserve, exit cap, costs of sale — producing levered and unlevered IRR, equity multiple, payback year.

Sensitivity matrix

The deal re-run across a grid of assumptions, colored by whether each outcome still works. Cost overrun × sale value for a development; exit cap × rent growth for a hold.

Credit hub

Lender term sheets side by side — LTV or LTC, rate, points, amortization — each showing what it does to DSCR, cash to close, and returns. Pick one and it fills the financing inputs above.

Development

Project types

Ground-up, teardown & rebuild, gut rehab, conversion, entitlement. The choice reshapes the inputs, the analysis, and the milestone list — a teardown gets a demolition line; an entitlement play gets pursuit costs.

Suggested defaults

Every type arrives with sensible starting numbers. All of them are editable, and changing type never overwrites a value you typed.

Budget tracker

Budget by category against real costs as they land. Over-budget lines flag themselves; contingency burn is tracked separately.

Draws and change orders

Equity and loan draws, dated. Change orders approved and pending, netted against the budget.

Schedule

Milestones with target and actual dates, weighted for percent complete. Projects a completion date from the slippage so far.

Live re-forecast

The project re-underwritten against what's actually happened — spent to date, cost to complete, projected profit, and the delta versus the original underwriting. Reads on track, eroding, or at risk.

Alerts

Margin erosion, contingency burn, schedule slip — surfaced on the project and on the dashboard.

Location

Geocode the address and the project carries a map, used on the presentation's location page.

Media gallery

Photos, renders, site plans and documents. Images are downscaled in the browser before upload, so a 6MB phone photo is stored and served as a few hundred kilobytes.

Project log

Dated notes by category — site visit, decision, risk, update. Each note has a checkbox controlling whether it appears in the presentation.

Portfolio

Properties

Acquisition, financing, income and expense, valuations — with metrics computed from the real financing rows rather than from underwriting assumptions.

Actuals

Record what really happened, period by period, next to what was projected.

Capital ledger

Every real dollar in and out, dated — producing fund-style metrics: DPI, TVPI, and XIRR since inception with today's equity as the terminal value.

Ownership

A simple cap table per property: who holds what percentage.

Equity waterfall

Return of capital, preferred return, then tiered promote splits. Tiers, hurdles and shares are all adjustable.

Exit scenarios

Hold, refinance, or sell — compared on the same numbers, with rule-based suggestions.

Documents

Appraisals, contracts, statements, stored per property.

Investors

Investor records

Contacts, their stakes, and their participation across deals.

Reports

Generate an investor statement: everything computed now, frozen into a snapshot, published at a private link.

Investor portal · /investor/[token]

An investor's position, holdings and statement archive, at their own link.

Presenting and sharing

Presentation mode · /account/present

Your dashboard as full-screen slides with keyboard navigation, assembled from live data.

Project deck

A development as a presentation: cover, gallery, location, the deal as underwritten, progress, budget, funding, live re-forecast, sensitivity, and the notes you chose to include.

Deal sheet · /deal/[token]

A public, branded, read-only page for an analysis or a property: the tests as gauges, sources and uses, the income or profit waterfall, the hold projection, the sensitivity matrix, and every number behind the charts.

Investor split on a share

Optionally show the LP/GP split on a shared sheet: preferred return, promote, and what each side receives.

Link expiry

Shared links expire — 90 days by default, adjustable to 30, 180, or never. An expired link shows a branded page offering a fresh one, not an error.

Analytics per share

View counts, plus where and when.

Prospecting

Prospects database · /account/prospects

Internal only. Developers to approach, annotated with their zone's appreciation so the strongest submarkets rise to the top.

Members' deal board · /account/deals

Deals other members have published, in one place. Expired links are filtered out.

Chat

Direct messages and channels between members.

Operations

Admin · /admin

Leads, saved analyses, users, analytics, audit trail, and errors.

Access control

Sign-in is invitation-based: an allowlist, with requests queued for approval.

Audit trail

An immutable record of who changed what and when.

Error monitoring

Every server error is captured, grouped by cause, and shown in the admin panel. A new one emails you.

Rate limiting

The endpoints a stranger can reach are capped.

What holds it together

Three properties are worth stating plainly, because they're the reason this isn't a spreadsheet with a website on it:

One set of numbers. Your view and the investor's view are rendered from the same computation. They cannot disagree.

Private by default. Row-level security means every record is scoped to its owner in the database itself, not just in the interface. Sharing is an explicit act, per deal, and revocable.

Nothing is stale. Presentations read live data. The one deliberate exception is an issued investor statement, which is frozen on purpose.

Figures produced by this software are estimates based on the assumptions you enter. They are not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.