One agent ran the numbers. The other didn’t. Same city, same property type, $500 difference in what investors actually offer.
The agent who ran the numbers owned the conversation. She knew the real yield. She knew the cap rate. She knew what the property was actually worth to an investor, not what the listing said it was worth to a buyer. When investors called, she had the answers. When competitors guessed, she had the math.
That’s the difference. An agent who runs live deal math on every listing doesn’t lose deals to agents who don’t know their own market.
If you are closing 6 to 8 deals a year and want to get the same kind of clarity before you take on a new listing, this is what we run for you.
See related reading on our site.
Who This Is For
If your business runs on relationships — repeat clients, referrals, the people already in your sphere — you know your biggest challenge isn’t getting leads, it’s holding onto the ones you have and showing them, in numbers, that you’re building real value under each property you take on.
Nobody expects you to be a financial analyst. But your clients do expect you to understand the real math behind an investment property, and whether a given deal actually stacks up.
If you’ve ever wanted to run those numbers yourself, without handing anything to a paid pro, this is your week. No spreadsheet background needed.
What It Actually Does
Here’s the actual sequence when you run this on a property. First, it loads every piece of relevant data about that property that it can find — the official listing, any associated MLS pages, the county’s own property record, and the local title company’s record, if that’s available where you work. Then it uses that combined picture to calculate five things, one after the next, in order.
Then it moves to the actual investment math. Second, it estimates what the property has actually earned for the owner so far, after holding costs — the difference between the rent it’s been bringing in and the expenses the owner has paid out, including mortgage, insurance, taxes, and whatever else is due every month. Third, it projects what that earnings pattern is likely to look like in the next six months, and the next 12, using the actual payment history the owner has built up so far, not just a guess about future rent. Fourth, it pulls the owner’s current mortgage balance and uses that, along with the projected rent, to calculate the actual return on that specific, real debt load — how much the property is earning the owner every year, relative to what they’re putting into it. And the fifth calculation is the one that actually connects all of the above to what an investor is actually trying to decide: it compares that real, debt-adjusted return to what a reasonable, diversified investment portfolio is likely to earn over the same period, using the established benchmarks for that.
That’s the whole point of the exercise. You’re not just showing an owner a pretty chart about their property — you’re putting that property into the same math an actual investor uses every day, side by side with the standard they’re already familiar with. And you’re doing it with their real numbers, pulled from their real life, not a hypothetical.
How You Set It Up
Here’s the actual setup, because we do these and you can build it yourself from this. We have 2 Claude Code skills running on a schedule, and you can find the exact instructions for both in the description — the free starter version is in the description too, and you can try it on your own machine before you put it on a schedule. The first skill runs every Sunday morning, and it does the heavy lifting. It connects to Realtor.com through their own API — that’s the real Realtor.com data, live, every week, not a saved copy from last month. It pulls every active listing in the county, filters them to the right criteria — ours is more than 2 acres, because we’re targeting land, but you can point it at anything: a specific town, a certain number of bedrooms, whatever your market needs — and then it calculates the 2 relevant metrics for each one, the way an investor actually looks at a deal. Number 1 is the gross yield, how much rent the property produces relative to its purchase price, and number 2 is the cap rate, how much cash it spits out in the first year relative to its purchase price, after debt service — both of those are common, practical, real-number metrics that actually get used in an investment decision. It writes both of those, along with the address and the listing link, into a plain Google Sheet — the sheet is the source of truth, and the video reads it live from the sheet every Monday. The second skill runs every Monday morning and turns that data into your marketing. It reads the latest row from the same Google Sheet — whatever is at the top — and uses that to generate the week’s email and the week’s social post. The email goes out Monday morning to the investor list, and the post gets scheduled for Tuesday morning, so the content is always fresh, it’s always about the current market, and you never have to touch it. If you’re thinking, I don’t have a list, start with the post. The scheduled post is what builds the list. Every piece of content points back to the same landing page, and that’s what the lead form lives on — so even if you’re starting from zero, you’re building an asset while you’re building the list.
How It Gets You Found
Here’s what actually gets you found, and it’s quiet: a Google-friendly page title that includes the town and the phrase ‘investment property,’ so you show up when someone’s actually searching for that, and a clear, repeated headline on the page itself, so both Google and the visitor understand exactly what the page is in about 100 milliseconds.
This is not about ranking for a keyword. This is about being findable when you are exactly what the searcher is asking Google.
The free starter skills are built so you can run this on your own machine, with no coding, and watch the page appear in front of you while you’re still on the call.
What It Means For You
If you’re building a real estate investment business, this means you can run a new deal across your own numbers instead of asking a broker or a partner for a read on it. If you’re pushing for volume, it means you can filter a list of 100 leads instead of calling them all blind. And if you’re running a small operation, it means you can build something like this once and reuse it, instead of rebuilding it from scratch every time a number changes.
What It Frees You Up To Do
The real math here isn’t about closing more deals — it’s about what you stop losing by owning the numbers yourself.
You stop losing hours to a third-party tool you don’t understand, bills you didn’t expect, and the quiet worry that the numbers you’re showing a client are someone else’s best guess instead of yours.
You also stop losing flexibility. If you’re building a real relationship with a real investor, you know the moment a set standard answers stop being the right answer — the moment a deal is actually worth walking away from a percentage split.
Nobody outside this room can tell you what that moment is worth to your business.
If you’re building a business where every deal matters, every relationship matters, every call matters — this is what lets you go into every one of them knowing exactly what you’re looking at.
What To Do First
If you’re pushing for volume right now, go make a call instead — the pipeline is more valuable than this exercise.
Not ‘build a website’ or ‘post on social.’ Those are activities. This is an assignment: run the numbers on what it actually costs to acquire a deal, what that deal actually generates, and whether the gap between the two is getting bigger or smaller.
You do not need to be a programmer. You open Claude Code, you type in plain English — ‘run the acquisition cost calculation,’ ‘show me the ROI on the last 6 deals,’ ‘what’s the gap between what we’re paying to get a deal and what it actually returns’ — and it builds the actual calculation and shows you the real math, live, on the screen, without you writing a line of code.
The version of this one that’s already built is called ‘deal-economics.’ Open source, free, no sign-up. The repository link is in the description, and the whole thing runs in the free tier — no cost, no trial, just install it and run it.
If you want to run this on your own business — not just watch us do it on YouTube — here’s your next step.
We offer a free 15-minute call. It’s just us, Al and Victoria, and we’ll look at what you’re already doing and tell you honestly what fits and what doesn’t. The link to book it is right in the description below, and our number’s there too.
Or start tinkering yourself. The free starter skills are open-source on GitHub — that link’s in the description as well. Clone it, try it, own it.
We’re Al and Victoria Pinder, husband-and-wife ICON agents at eXp Realty — and we run this in our own business every single day.
The tools behind this week’s job: see every AI tool we run and what it costs, start with the beginner guide, and grab the free skills you can install in one line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What math does this tool calculate for investment properties?
The tool calculates five things: it loads all relevant property data from listings and county records, estimates what the property has earned the owner after holding costs, projects earnings for the next six to twelve months based on actual payment history, calculates the real return on the owner’s specific debt load, and compares that return to what a diversified investment portfolio typically earns using established benchmarks.
How often does the system update with new listings?
The first skill runs every Sunday morning and pulls active listings from Realtor.com’s API, then writes the calculated metrics to a Google Sheet. The second skill runs Monday morning, reads the latest data from that sheet, and generates fresh email and social content based on the current market listings.
Do I need coding experience to set this up?
No coding experience is required. You can open Claude Code and type plain English requests like “run the acquisition cost calculation” or “show me the ROI on the last 6 deals,” and it builds the actual calculations and shows you the results live on screen. The free starter skills are also available open-source on GitHub and run on the free tier with no cost or sign-up.