Real Estate Investor Tools to Price the Deal
Deals do not wait on a call back. You walk a property on Tuesday morning. It looks like it works. But “looks like it works” is not a number, and the only way most investors get a real number is to send the address to a lender and wait. A day. Sometimes two. By the time the answer comes back, the seller has three other offers and you are bidding against people who moved faster than you did. That is the gap real estate investor tools are built to close.
We have been on the other side of that. Before Ternus was a lender, we were investors buying houses — about 2,000 of them — and the part that cost us the most money was never the rehab or the exit. It was the waiting. So we built the math into the outside of the building.
There are three property investor resources live on ternus.com right now. They are free. Each one takes about two minutes. Neither loan sizer pulls credit.
Flip Loan Calculator
There is rarely one way to fund a flip. There are usually four, and they do not pay you the same.
Put in ARV, rehab cost, hold period, and selling costs, and the calculator sizes four different ways we can fund the same deal, side by side. You see what each structure does to your cash in, your carry, and what is left when you sell. That is the comparison most investors never get to make, because they get one option from one lender and take it.
Run it before you write the offer, not after. The offer is the only part of a flip you fully control. Size a flip →
DSCR Loan Calculator
Rental deals live or die on one ratio, and most spreadsheets calculate it optimistically.
This one does not. It computes DSCR on the Day-1 qualifying payment with taxes and insurance escrow included — exactly the way our underwriters compute it. That matters more than it sounds like it does. A deal that clears at 1.15 on your math and 0.98 on ours is a deal that falls apart two weeks into the file, after you have already spent money on it.
Size it here and the number you are looking at is the number we are going to be looking at. Size a rental →
Rehab Budget Tool
Ask ten investors for a rehab budget and you will get ten numbers scribbled on the back of a walkthrough sheet. Then the draw requests start, and the scope nobody wrote down becomes the delay nobody planned for. It is exactly the kind of gap real estate investor tools exist to close.
This one builds the scope room by room against cost ranges adjusted for your state. When you are done, it exports to Excel in our draw format, plus CSV and PDF, and emails you an editable link so you can update it as bids come in. One build covers your contractor conversations and your loan file at the same time.
Those cost ranges are planning estimates. Verify them with your contractors — that is what contractors are for. The point of this property investor resource is that you walk into both conversations with a real document instead of a guess. Build a budget →
Why we gave this away
Because fast closings are not luck.
Speed at a lender is a discipline, and most of it happens before the file ever reaches us. Clean numbers, a real scope, a ratio that was computed honestly the first time. Every one of these real estate investor tools produces the exact inputs we are going to ask for anyway. Use them, and when you do call, we are checking your work instead of starting it.
That is the whole trade. You get your answer in two minutes instead of two days. We get a file we can actually move on.
Run your next deal through one of them this week. If the numbers work, call us about funding it.
— Tim Herriage, Founder & CEO, Ternus
Estimates for discussion purposes only — not a rate quote, commitment, approval, bid, appraisal, or feasibility determination. All figures are subject to underwriting, verification, property valuation, and final approval. Rehab cost ranges are national planning estimates adjusted for your state; verify all costs with your contractors. Nothing in this post is legal, tax, or financial advice.
