Overview
In order to successfully flip houses you need to be able to analyze deals and estimate rehab costs upfront to determine if a project's a good deal, OR NOT. Once you get a good deal under contract, you need to be able to manage your project schedules and track your project budgets to get your projects completed on-time and on-budget to maximize your profitability.
In this article, we will discuss the top things you should consider before choosing a house flipping software for your business.
Download our Comprehensive Checklist on How to Choose the Best House Flipping Software 👇
Best House Flipping Software Checklist
Download Our Comprehensive Checklist on How to Choose the Best House Flipping Software
PDF DOWNLOAD#1 Software Functionality
Obviously, the most important aspect of selecting a house flipping software is the functionality and features that the software provides that can improve, organize and streamline your house flipping business.
A lot of house flipping softwares only include Deal Analysis tools which really only covers a fraction of the needs of a house flipping business. It's important to choose a house flipping software that covers ALL aspects of house flipping process, which can be broken down into 4 key areas:
- Deal Analysis
- Repair Estimation
- Rehab Project Management
- Project Accounting & Expense Tracking
Deal Analysis Tools
House flipping calculators and deal analysis tools are a dime a dozen these days, and honestly analyzing house flipping deals is just basic math, which can mostly be performed in your brain or on a basic calculator.
However, the real power of using a
house flipping calculator is the ability to save your results and create professional
investment reports that you can share with your business partners and lenders.
Learn more about our
House Flipping Calculator
How to Analyze a House Flip Case Study
Setting Up Your Default Analysis Settings
How to Setup Buying Costs
Repair Estimation Tools
One of the biggest challenges house flippers face is having an organized and streamlined system to accurately estimate repair costs for their projects. Here are some key features you need to help you Estimate Repairs more accurately and efficiently:
- Starter Templates & Costs Databases to help you quickly load Estimate Templates
- Ability to Save your own Labor & Material Pricing
- Ability to Save Templates for Future Projects
- SOW Notes for creating written Scopes of Work for Contractors
- Ability to create Estimate Reports & SOW reports
Case Study: How to Estimate Rehab Repair Costs
Case Study: How to Estimate Costs for a Cosmetic Rehab
Case Study: Estimating Rehab Costs per SF
Rehab Project Management Tools
Once you get a flip project under contract, you will need to have business processes and systems in-place to manage your construction budget, tasks, schedules & contractors.
Rehab Scheduling Tools
To keep your project on Schedule, you will want to create a Gantt schedule to plan the major work milestones that need to be completed so you can establish a project completion date.
Learn about our
Project Scheduler
Daily Task Management Tools
To keep your tasks and to-do's organized you will need a Task Management tool to help you get your day-to-day items completed on-time.
Learn about our
Task Manager
Project Calendars
If you have multiple house flips going on at one time you can quickly start to get overwhelmed with tasks that need to be completed.
The house flipping software you choose should provide an Overall
Project Calendar so you can manage all of your schedules and tasks in one location.
CASE STUDY: How to Create a Schedule for a Rehab Project
Project Accounting & Expense Tracking
Creating a project budget for all of your project costs should be completed upfront when you are first performing your due diligence for a project. Once you get a property under contract, it's important to track your actual expenses against your initial project budget to forecast your project's profitability.
Without a project budget in-place, and a system to track your expenses you will have no idea if you are over or under budget on the project.
The house flipping software you choose should include an budgeting and expense tracking component so you can track your actual costs against your initial budgets to forecast project profitability.
Learn more about our
Project Budgeter Tool
Templates, Templates, Templates
Although all houses are different, the house flipping process generally requires the same repeatable steps from the initial purchase to the final closing.
The house flipping software you choose should provide templates for all aspects of the house flipping process including:
- Estimate Starter Templates with a pre-built Rehab Cost Database
- SOW Note Templates for Writing Detailed Scopes of Work
- Gantt Schedule Starter Templates for Creating Schedules in Seconds
- Task Checklists Templates
- Contract Document Templates
In FlipperForce, Templates are one of our biggest focuses. We are working on creating as many templates as possible to build pre-built systems that you can quickly download and get operational in a matter of minutes. And of course, you can customize and save your own templates that you use on future projects!
Estimate Starter Templates
Schedule Starter Templates
Task Starter Templates
The Intangibles
The software features and functionality are obviously the most important aspect of choosing a House Flipping Software, but there are other intangibles you need to consider such as software support, software training, the company's reputation and dedication to continuously improving their software platform.
#2 Software Type
Now that you know the software features and functionality you need to manage your house flipping business, let's discuss the different options you have for implementing these systems:
All-in-One vs Piecemeal
When choosing softwares to manage your house flipping business you will want to consider if you prefer an all-in-one, integrated solution or if you prefer to piecemeal separate software solutions together.
In a piecemeal solution you could use spreadsheets to analyze a deal, a separate estimating software to estimate costs, a generic project management solution to manage your schedules/daily tasks, Quickbooks to track expenses, & a cloud storage solution to manage documents.
Or you could use an all-in-one integrated solution that handles your deal analysis, repair estimation, schedules, tasks, budgets, & expenses all in one house flipping software platform.
House Flipping Specific vs General Business Management
There are a wide range of Project Management and General Business Management tools available to help you manage your schedules and daily tasks.
When choosing your software solutions you will need to decide if you prefer a house flipping software that is specifically built for managing a house flipping business or use a generic project management software.
FlipperForce is tailored specifically for managing a house flipping business, so it comes pre-built with Estimate Templates, Schedule Templates, Task Templates, Checklists & Reports for managing rehab projects.
#3 Software Support
The second most important thing to consider when choosing a house flipping software is product support. Ultimately, you want to choose a software company and team that will be able to answer your questions in a timely manner.
- Do they provide multiple channels to ask questions (phone/chat/email)?
- Are they timely with their responses?
- Do they provide a knowledge base of FAQs?
- Who handles support? Do they outsource support to India or do they have in-house support?
HUMBLE BRAG
I personally handle all support questions and am generally available between 8AM to 5PM Mon-Fri, but also respond to questions after hours and on weekends.
As the founder and creator I know everything there is to know about our software, so I can provide much more informed responses than outsourced support teams.
#4 Software Training & Tutorials
When choosing a house flipping software you need to have solid support, but you also need to have training and educational resources that can help you get the most out of the software.
- Does the software company provide video tutorials?
- Do they have case studies and examples of how to use the software?
At FlipperForce we are posting new
Software Video Tutorials and Case Studies every week that help you learn the powerful tools and features you can use to improve and streamline your house flipping business. In fact, all of our video tutorials are built directly into the 'User Guide' in our software so you can easily learn the software at your own pace.
#5 Educational Resources
Most of our competitors and real estate guru's charge thousands of dollars to get their 'secret systems' to learn how to flip houses.
We don't think you should have to pay to learn how to flip houses which is why we created a free, online, step-by-step curriculum on
How To Flip Houses that you can use to learn how to be a better house flipper.
- Does the software company have other educational resources to help you learn how to be a better house flipper?
- Do they charge additional money for their educational resources?
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#6 Continuous Improvement
- Does the software company frequently add new features and functionality?
- Does they have a clear product road map for the future?
- What are their short-term goals for new features?
- What are their long-term vision for the development of the software?
At FlipperForce we are constantly working on building
new features and functionality to improve our software platform.
We want our development process to be as transparent as possible so we have created a
Product Road Map that displays the features we are currently developing and provides our long-term vision for our software platform.
#7 Collaboration
When choosing a house flipping software you want your voice to be heard and be able to provide feedback and suggestions on new software features and functionality that will benefit you and your business.
- Does the software company provide an easy way to make feature suggestions & recommendations?
- Is the founder or development team easily accessible to collaborate and discuss ideas?
- Who is the decision maker that handles approving & developing features?
At FlipperForce we provide a
Feature Suggestion page that allows our users to make suggestions and up-vote suggestions that have been provided by other users.
We use our Feature Suggestion page to help us collaborate with our users on ideas for features and functionality and help plan our product road map for the future.
#8 Reviews & Reputation
The real estate industry is notorious for gurus selling get rich quick schemes and 'secret systems'. A lot of these gurus work together and cross-promote each other's products so they can take the most amount of your money as possible.
- What’s the company or founder's reputation? Do you even know who they are?
- Can you find information about the Founder on Linkedin or BiggerPockets?
- Does the founder or software company have bad reviews online (Google, Facebook, BBB, BiggerPockets, etc.)?
- Do they have authentic reviews verified by a 3rd Party?
- Are they a real estate guru selling get rich quick schemes & 'secrets'?
- Do they promote other real estate guru's get rich quick schemes & 'secrets'?
- Do they constantly bombard you with emails up-selling you on new 'investing secrets'?
- Do they have pictures on their website of people on the beach, fast cars and yachts?
The truth is flipping houses is hard and there are very
real risks that you won't succeed.
If a company tries to sell you on get rich quick strategies and lavish lifestyles and/or associate themselves with other real estate gurus, they likely don't have your best interests in mind. Ultimately, these guru's just want to take the most amount of money out of your pockets as possible for themselves and their guru buddies.
Here's a few of our verified 3rd party review Below!
love it! Flipperforce is so useful! was going crazy trying to keep up with receipts and manage scheduling until I found this! Keep up the great work!
FlipperForce has made my life a lot easier by providing a tool to stay organized. Support is quick and responsive. Also, they work to improve the system.
Easy to navigate, a ton of great resources to use, and very helpful tools to keep things organized.
Just excellent across the board. It helped me as a first time real estate investor get approval for Private Money funding
This is an incredible tool,
We take our reputation very seriously and stand behind the quality of our product & service. We aren't perfect, but admit our mistakes and strive to alway's do what's right!
#9 Company Values
Ultimately, you want to invest in a software platform and development team that has big dreams and visions for their platform that are committed to continuously improving their product and service.
You want a software platform that is committed to collaborating and working together with their users to build a platform that is truly built for the community, by the community.
You want a software platform that will be transparent about their development process and honest and willing to take accountability if/when they mistakes.
And above all, you just want to pick a software platform and team that you can trust and know will do what's right!
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