8 ms·

Show HN: I built an extension for analyzing rental properties in Zillow

67 points by thecalebf 4y ago

Hey everyone, I build a Chrome Extension for real estate investors to be able to easily calculate the cash flow of a rental property right within Zillow. As an aspiring real estate investor, I found spreadsheets and proprietary online calculators like Bigger Pockets to be complicated or slow. With Homescope, you can bring this within your workflow and estimate your operating expenses instantly.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
azeemh 4y ago
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  People do not have the funds, access to credit, political connections, and expertise to acquire sufficient land, go through the permitting process, and end up with an affordable housing neighborhood. An app will not change that.
  - azeemh 4y ago
    i disagree because land developers and land development programs already exist we simply need to coordinate a co-op effort. using homes an investment leads to hoarding of resources. Why does america have more empty homes than homeless people? Markets have failed because they're chasing imaginary rental demand instead of adapting to real demand. If people could only own 1 residential property at a time this would not be an issue and the whole program thecalebf built would not be needed. the program you built helps exacerbate a social ill, and while it's great technically it's horrible socially. I hope this feedback helps you pivot to solve the more pressing problem in real estate.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Define “hoard” here.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    House Hoarders: Private Equity Edition – Don Mullen, CEO of Pretium Partners https://pestakeholder.org/news/house-hoarders-private-equity-edition-don-mullen-ceo-of-pretium-partners/ https://pestakeholder.org/news/house-hoarders-private-equity...
- twblalock 4y ago
  Landlords provide a necessary service to the poorest in society. If there were no landlords, people who could not afford to purchase homes would have nowhere to live. Landlords suffer from bad tenants, and also from bad government policies like rent control and the cancelling of rent during Covid (and nobody cancelled the mortgage bills for landlords, or the property tax). They are constantly portrayed as villains, often by the same people who benefit from the housing landlords provide. What you call hoarding is the market at work, providing investment opportunities to landlords and housing to people who can’t afford to buy, all at the same time.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Housing is a service? Generally real estate businesses aren’t thought of that way.
  - azeemh 4y ago
    Landlords dont provide any services. Construction workers build the house. if there were no landlords people would still have 1 home and builders would get hired by the homeowner who could finally afford homeownership. We have more empty homes in America than homeless people. The market is not working because its failing to respond to the demand of more than 90% of the population for affordable housing despite us having more supply of housing than homeless people in need.
downrightmike 4y ago
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  BREIT is above $50b [0], which is basically enough to buy up literally all of the inventory for many housing markets combined. I'm hoping there is some sensible legislation, as we can't rely on the Fed hiking the rate to the moon because cutting medicare to pay the interest on the national debt is not gonna go over well with voters :( [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-property-fund-targeting-small-investors-passes-50-billion-11642510801 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-property-fund-target...
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    You mean starting to live within our means and spend less? You mean the responsibility falling to the families and local church communities? Sounds great.
  - gruez 4y ago
    > BREIT is above $50b [0], which is basically enough to buy up literally all of the inventory for many housing markets combined. That's a shocking figure, but there's multiple factors that makes it misleadingly shocking: 1. The $50B was raised over the last 5 years. The amount of cash they have sitting around to actually buy houses is much less. 2. I'm presuming that by "many housing markets" you mean different cities. Presumably the fund is interested in buying properties across the country, so it's not too surprising that the same amount of money can buy all the houses if they concentrated purchasing in a few select cities. It's like arguing that your local school district consumes too much food by pointing out that they can "buy up literally all the inventory for many supermarkets combined". That might be true, but it doesn't give me much information about scale. 3. The WSJ article says that fund buys "rental-apartment buildings, warehouses, office buildings, casinos and other property types". Comparing a pot of money designated for multiple purposes, against a subset of purposes is misleading.
- echelon 4y ago
  > so these assholes sink That's uncalled for. You're letting your envy through.
status200 4y ago
Yes, real estate investors are the definitely the group most in need of empowerment... /s Edit: The ethics of this project are questionable, assisting real estate investors at the expense of first time home buyers (indicated by the heavy focus of this tool on optimizing profit through rental income) is not what our society needs at the current moment, in my opinion, as it reduces the pool of available homes for sale and forces our society further into separation between people catapulting their wealth and those who just want an affordable house to actually live in with their families while adding an asset to their net worth.
- tigerBL00D 4y ago
  I am not here to defend any particular group, but I just don't think this comment is fair to anyone. At the end of the day anything that can help the market become more efficient is a good thing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - techsupporter 4y ago
    > At the end of the day anything that can help the market become more efficient is a good thing. Efficient for whom? The person who has a one-off need for housing every few years? Or the person who already has the time, money, and connections to leverage money into bundling up more housing for themselves to loan out to that first group? This also presumes that housing, at least primary residences, should be a market instead of a utility, which is not at all a given considering how the "market" is working out (or not) for a lot of people right now. Tools like this further increase that gap.
- thecalebf 4y ago
  This tool is more for smaller investors not really massive funds or companies like Blackstone.
  - feet 4y ago
theduder99 4y ago
Looking at the Privacy Practices, I see PII info and authentication info. Can you speak to what exactly is collected and how?
- thecalebf 4y ago
  Hey there, yes the only thing collected is authentication so email password signing in via Firebase. It isn’t used in any way other than auth. Hope that answers your question!
nicnash08 4y ago
I've wanted this for a long time, and it makes a ton of sense. Thanks!
- thecalebf 4y ago
  Let me know if you have all the tools you need :). Always open to add things to help make finding deals easier!
philip1209 4y ago
I have a friend who's been doing this. Some things that confuse me, if anybody can shed light: 1. Do other developed countries allow 20x leverage on cash to buy homes? 2. It seems like most real estate investors aren't pursuing commercial loans, but instead are using personal home-loans. Is there any regulation of this? ("Oh, I intended to live there, but then something happened") 3. How can banks afford to give out loans at interest rates that are less than inflation? Is this due to Federal Reserve rates, and if so - do other developed countries maintain such low interest rates + tax benefits for home purchases? It seems like the US government is propping up this entire industry, rather than letting a free market operate.
- serjester 4y ago
  I'm going to qualify this with I'm not an expert but I do have some familiarity with the space. 1. While possible, loans where you put less than 20% down are tied to very high interest rates. Most people I know in the space avoid these or quickly refinance once the cash is available. 2. Commercial loans are difficult to get for an individual investor. If you're purchasing residential housing these aren't practical. 3. Banks interest rates are only tied to the federal interest rate.
- hsuduebc2 4y ago
  1). Yes they do. Some even loan you 110% (Netherland..) of property value but mostly they loan you around 80%-90% of price. Usually bigger leverage means bigger interest. 2. Not really and honestly banks usually don't care if you pay in time. 3. Now I'm talking from experience as resident of some European country. When you are giving a loan to someone to purchase a property as a bank you are not loaning your own money. You loan this money usually from central bank and then "re-loan" it for higher interest to customer. Most of the mortgages in Europe are with fixed interest for some period therefore inflation doesn't really bothers you because bank loaned this money from central bank in times where you get the mortgage when interests were low.
  - hsuduebc2 4y ago
    It worth noting that these "central bank money" is not giveaway of free cash flow. If another bank have surplus of cash on the end of the day they can lend it to the bank for some interest rate so they can make at least something out of it. This is the way how government controls inflation. When they set higher rates of interest banks usually rise their interest rates because it's simply is easier to let them sit in central banks.
chriskelley 4y ago
>"We make analyzing a rental property so easy Grandma can do it!" There are lots of grandmas who are engineers, scientists, doctors, and inventors. There are plenty of ways to land that message without carrying forward the spirit of 1950s Madison Ave. Plus, that copy doesn't tell anything about the product, it's fluff. "Analyze deal potential without leaving Zillow" "Automatically analyze rental properties as you browse" "View critical deal metrics as you browse" etc
- dgfitz 4y ago
  > There are lots of grandmas who are engineers, scientists, doctors, and inventors. And there are a 100x multiple of grandmas who are not any of those things. Your virtue has been signaled. It’s just a figure of speech.
- jahewson 4y ago
  Grandma already owns all the property nowadays.
- thecalebf 4y ago
  Thanks for the tips!
joshuaheard 4y ago
I've been thinking about making something like this. I can't wait to take a close look at it.
thecalebf 4y ago
Also if Zillow is hiring new grad engineers reach out :)
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
- itake 4y ago
  Do you have any information that explores this topic deeper? Mortgages are a forcing function for retirement savings and help people in retirement that were not able to manage their income. If home values would not increase, what should happen to everyone that wasn't able to save for retirement and can't rely on home equity?
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Housing as a savings for retirement only works if you retire at the right time. Many people in 2008 could not retire because of the housing crash. Right now, money that would go into other investments is going into having to buy inflated housing. So while this might help people who are currently retiring, it hurt the people looking to use it as a method to rite in the future. Forbes has some good insights here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/02/28/treating-housing-as-investment-is-a-bad-idea-for-homeowners-and-hurts-the-economy/?sh=261f16c159ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/02/28/treating...
    - itake 4y ago
      I agree with all the article's points, but for all of its reasons, housing needs to be an investment. The down payment is a significant portion of net worth. For this down payment to not grow in value, is detrimental to end of life needs. What is the alternative? Socialized housing?
      - itake 4y ago
        while I agree housing is a terrible investment, its still an investment for people that aren't investing. People will pay their mortgage than set money aside for into investment vehicles.
natas 4y ago
Zillow has sent cease and desist letters, and sometimes sued people using the data from their site. You might be okay if you're not in the US though.
- synicalx 4y ago
  IMO the appropriate response to this is to open source it, once the source is out in the wild then there's not much they can do about it.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    That puts Open Source in an antagonistic position, which is overall harmful to the ecosystem.
- thecalebf 4y ago
  The extension isn't storing any data from Zillow. Bigger Pocket's proprietary calculator pulls the data from Zillow as well. I think as long as you aren't storing or trying to make it proprietary it is better.
  - skanga 4y ago
    I installed the extension but when I click on it (in Zillow) all I see is an EMPTY popout panel ...
    - thecalebf 4y ago
      Hey, interesting. Make sure you have a home opened and it should populate with the charts. If that doesn't work feel free to send me an email at caleb at homescope.io and I can help you out :)
      - skanga 4y ago
        Sure - will do.
mistrial9 4y ago
speaking of rental property investments -- here is a very detailed apartment landlord wealth-generation story from Berkeley, California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakireddy_Bali_Reddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakireddy_Bali_Reddy
abootstrapper 4y ago
Nice tool! Curious why it doesn’t auto populate Zillows estimated rent value?
WonderBuilder 4y ago
This is great! Beautifully designed and effective. I'll definitely be trying this out.
- thecalebf 4y ago
  Thank you. Let me know if it meets your needs :)

67 points by thecalebf 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

azeemh 4y ago

lotsofpulp 4y ago
People do not have the funds, access to credit, political connections, and expertise to acquire sufficient land, go through the permitting process, and end up with an affordable housing neighborhood. An app will not change that.
- azeemh 4y ago
  i disagree because land developers and land development programs already exist we simply need to coordinate a co-op effort. using homes an investment leads to hoarding of resources. Why does america have more empty homes than homeless people? Markets have failed because they're chasing imaginary rental demand instead of adapting to real demand. If people could only own 1 residential property at a time this would not be an issue and the whole program thecalebf built would not be needed. the program you built helps exacerbate a social ill, and while it's great technically it's horrible socially. I hope this feedback helps you pivot to solve the more pressing problem in real estate.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
Define “hoard” here.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  House Hoarders: Private Equity Edition – Don Mullen, CEO of Pretium Partners https://pestakeholder.org/news/house-hoarders-private-equity-edition-don-mullen-ceo-of-pretium-partners/ https://pestakeholder.org/news/house-hoarders-private-equity...
twblalock 4y ago
Landlords provide a necessary service to the poorest in society. If there were no landlords, people who could not afford to purchase homes would have nowhere to live. Landlords suffer from bad tenants, and also from bad government policies like rent control and the cancelling of rent during Covid (and nobody cancelled the mortgage bills for landlords, or the property tax). They are constantly portrayed as villains, often by the same people who benefit from the housing landlords provide. What you call hoarding is the market at work, providing investment opportunities to landlords and housing to people who can’t afford to buy, all at the same time.
- junofan 4y ago
  Housing is a service? Generally real estate businesses aren’t thought of that way.
- azeemh 4y ago
  Landlords dont provide any services. Construction workers build the house. if there were no landlords people would still have 1 home and builders would get hired by the homeowner who could finally afford homeownership. We have more empty homes in America than homeless people. The market is not working because its failing to respond to the demand of more than 90% of the population for affordable housing despite us having more supply of housing than homeless people in need.

downrightmike 4y ago

_huayra_ 4y ago
BREIT is above $50b [0], which is basically enough to buy up literally all of the inventory for many housing markets combined. I'm hoping there is some sensible legislation, as we can't rely on the Fed hiking the rate to the moon because cutting medicare to pay the interest on the national debt is not gonna go over well with voters :( [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-property-fund-targeting-small-investors-passes-50-billion-11642510801 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-property-fund-target...
- a-user-you-like 4y ago
  You mean starting to live within our means and spend less? You mean the responsibility falling to the families and local church communities? Sounds great.
- gruez 4y ago
  > BREIT is above $50b [0], which is basically enough to buy up literally all of the inventory for many housing markets combined. That's a shocking figure, but there's multiple factors that makes it misleadingly shocking: 1. The $50B was raised over the last 5 years. The amount of cash they have sitting around to actually buy houses is much less. 2. I'm presuming that by "many housing markets" you mean different cities. Presumably the fund is interested in buying properties across the country, so it's not too surprising that the same amount of money can buy all the houses if they concentrated purchasing in a few select cities. It's like arguing that your local school district consumes too much food by pointing out that they can "buy up literally all the inventory for many supermarkets combined". That might be true, but it doesn't give me much information about scale. 3. The WSJ article says that fund buys "rental-apartment buildings, warehouses, office buildings, casinos and other property types". Comparing a pot of money designated for multiple purposes, against a subset of purposes is misleading.
echelon 4y ago
> so these assholes sink That's uncalled for. You're letting your envy through.

status200 4y ago

Yes, real estate investors are the definitely the group most in need of empowerment... /s Edit: The ethics of this project are questionable, assisting real estate investors at the expense of first time home buyers (indicated by the heavy focus of this tool on optimizing profit through rental income) is not what our society needs at the current moment, in my opinion, as it reduces the pool of available homes for sale and forces our society further into separation between people catapulting their wealth and those who just want an affordable house to actually live in with their families while adding an asset to their net worth.

tigerBL00D 4y ago
I am not here to defend any particular group, but I just don't think this comment is fair to anyone. At the end of the day anything that can help the market become more efficient is a good thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- techsupporter 4y ago
  > At the end of the day anything that can help the market become more efficient is a good thing. Efficient for whom? The person who has a one-off need for housing every few years? Or the person who already has the time, money, and connections to leverage money into bundling up more housing for themselves to loan out to that first group? This also presumes that housing, at least primary residences, should be a market instead of a utility, which is not at all a given considering how the "market" is working out (or not) for a lot of people right now. Tools like this further increase that gap.
thecalebf 4y ago
This tool is more for smaller investors not really massive funds or companies like Blackstone.
- feet 4y ago

theduder99 4y ago

Looking at the Privacy Practices, I see PII info and authentication info. Can you speak to what exactly is collected and how?

thecalebf 4y ago
Hey there, yes the only thing collected is authentication so email password signing in via Firebase. It isn’t used in any way other than auth. Hope that answers your question!

nicnash08 4y ago

I've wanted this for a long time, and it makes a ton of sense. Thanks!

thecalebf 4y ago
Let me know if you have all the tools you need :). Always open to add things to help make finding deals easier!

philip1209 4y ago

I have a friend who's been doing this. Some things that confuse me, if anybody can shed light: 1. Do other developed countries allow 20x leverage on cash to buy homes? 2. It seems like most real estate investors aren't pursuing commercial loans, but instead are using personal home-loans. Is there any regulation of this? ("Oh, I intended to live there, but then something happened") 3. How can banks afford to give out loans at interest rates that are less than inflation? Is this due to Federal Reserve rates, and if so - do other developed countries maintain such low interest rates + tax benefits for home purchases? It seems like the US government is propping up this entire industry, rather than letting a free market operate.

serjester 4y ago
I'm going to qualify this with I'm not an expert but I do have some familiarity with the space. 1. While possible, loans where you put less than 20% down are tied to very high interest rates. Most people I know in the space avoid these or quickly refinance once the cash is available. 2. Commercial loans are difficult to get for an individual investor. If you're purchasing residential housing these aren't practical. 3. Banks interest rates are only tied to the federal interest rate.
hsuduebc2 4y ago
1). Yes they do. Some even loan you 110% (Netherland..) of property value but mostly they loan you around 80%-90% of price. Usually bigger leverage means bigger interest. 2. Not really and honestly banks usually don't care if you pay in time. 3. Now I'm talking from experience as resident of some European country. When you are giving a loan to someone to purchase a property as a bank you are not loaning your own money. You loan this money usually from central bank and then "re-loan" it for higher interest to customer. Most of the mortgages in Europe are with fixed interest for some period therefore inflation doesn't really bothers you because bank loaned this money from central bank in times where you get the mortgage when interests were low.
- hsuduebc2 4y ago
  It worth noting that these "central bank money" is not giveaway of free cash flow. If another bank have surplus of cash on the end of the day they can lend it to the bank for some interest rate so they can make at least something out of it. This is the way how government controls inflation. When they set higher rates of interest banks usually rise their interest rates because it's simply is easier to let them sit in central banks.

chriskelley 4y ago

>"We make analyzing a rental property so easy Grandma can do it!" There are lots of grandmas who are engineers, scientists, doctors, and inventors. There are plenty of ways to land that message without carrying forward the spirit of 1950s Madison Ave. Plus, that copy doesn't tell anything about the product, it's fluff. "Analyze deal potential without leaving Zillow" "Automatically analyze rental properties as you browse" "View critical deal metrics as you browse" etc

dgfitz 4y ago
> There are lots of grandmas who are engineers, scientists, doctors, and inventors. And there are a 100x multiple of grandmas who are not any of those things. Your virtue has been signaled. It’s just a figure of speech.
jahewson 4y ago
Grandma already owns all the property nowadays.
thecalebf 4y ago
Thanks for the tips!

joshuaheard 4y ago

I've been thinking about making something like this. I can't wait to take a close look at it.

thecalebf 4y ago

Also if Zillow is hiring new grad engineers reach out :)

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

itake 4y ago
Do you have any information that explores this topic deeper? Mortgages are a forcing function for retirement savings and help people in retirement that were not able to manage their income. If home values would not increase, what should happen to everyone that wasn't able to save for retirement and can't rely on home equity?
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Housing as a savings for retirement only works if you retire at the right time. Many people in 2008 could not retire because of the housing crash. Right now, money that would go into other investments is going into having to buy inflated housing. So while this might help people who are currently retiring, it hurt the people looking to use it as a method to rite in the future. Forbes has some good insights here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/02/28/treating-housing-as-investment-is-a-bad-idea-for-homeowners-and-hurts-the-economy/?sh=261f16c159ce https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2020/02/28/treating...
  - itake 4y ago
    I agree with all the article's points, but for all of its reasons, housing needs to be an investment. The down payment is a significant portion of net worth. For this down payment to not grow in value, is detrimental to end of life needs. What is the alternative? Socialized housing?
    - itake 4y ago
      while I agree housing is a terrible investment, its still an investment for people that aren't investing. People will pay their mortgage than set money aside for into investment vehicles.

natas 4y ago

Zillow has sent cease and desist letters, and sometimes sued people using the data from their site. You might be okay if you're not in the US though.

synicalx 4y ago
IMO the appropriate response to this is to open source it, once the source is out in the wild then there's not much they can do about it.
- tomrod 4y ago
  That puts Open Source in an antagonistic position, which is overall harmful to the ecosystem.
thecalebf 4y ago
The extension isn't storing any data from Zillow. Bigger Pocket's proprietary calculator pulls the data from Zillow as well. I think as long as you aren't storing or trying to make it proprietary it is better.
- skanga 4y ago
  I installed the extension but when I click on it (in Zillow) all I see is an EMPTY popout panel ...
  - thecalebf 4y ago
    Hey, interesting. Make sure you have a home opened and it should populate with the charts. If that doesn't work feel free to send me an email at caleb at homescope.io and I can help you out :)
    - skanga 4y ago
      Sure - will do.

mistrial9 4y ago

speaking of rental property investments -- here is a very detailed apartment landlord wealth-generation story from Berkeley, California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakireddy_Bali_Reddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakireddy_Bali_Reddy

abootstrapper 4y ago

Nice tool! Curious why it doesn’t auto populate Zillows estimated rent value?

WonderBuilder 4y ago

This is great! Beautifully designed and effective. I'll definitely be trying this out.

thecalebf 4y ago
Thank you. Let me know if it meets your needs :)