About
I'm James Murray. I run a small rental portfolio: about 25 beds of long-term student rentals, plus one premium short-term rental that nets around $120,000 a year. Recalc is the set of tools I use to underwrite my own deals, published free.
Every property I've bought started as arithmetic on a screen. Most calculators I tried handed me a number and expected me to trust it. I couldn't see the formula, couldn't see what counted as an expense, couldn't tell which convention they used. When the number is about to steer a six-figure decision, that's not good enough.
So every calculator here prints the formula and the intermediate values. If my assumption doesn't fit your deal, you'll see it, because nothing is hidden.
Early. Twenty-five beds is a real portfolio and also a small one. I'm not a guru with a course, and this site doesn't tell you what to buy. It shows you the same math I run: what a deal earns, what the lender will see, and what each number can't see. The student rentals taught me occupancy math the hard way, and the short-term rental taught me why gross revenue means nothing until expenses come out.
The formulas are the standard ones used in underwriting: the same definitions of NOI, cap rate, and debt service coverage a lender or appraiser uses. Where a metric has competing conventions (what counts as an operating expense, whether to include reserves), the calculator says which convention it uses. Market benchmarks in the guides come from published research and are linked to their sources.
Every tool is free and nothing is gated behind an email address. The site is supported by ads, not your inbox.
The cap rate is the fastest read on whether a deal deserves a closer look.