Property Investor Interlude

Taking a quick break from part 4 of my series of articles on SharePoint branding. I hope to have posted in a day or two, but my daughter just got the new Zelda game on Nintendo DS. Of course, now I am completely addicted to it and blogging is coming a distant second 🙂

The last game I got addicted to was the Zelda “Oracina of Time” on the Nintendo 64 – seems I have a weakness for Zelda games

So in the meantime, why not look at a program I wrote some years ago for property investors. Its free, easy to use and allows you to simulate buying investment properties in Australia, and allows you to see the tax and cash-flow scenarios.

www.ez-rent.com

Years ago I went on one of those ‘cheap flights’ to Queensland, where a marketing company attempted to sell me overpriced property. The chirpy sales girl had a fancy program that make the numbers look really good. I wondered if it was too good to be true.

So, EZ-Rent started life as an Excel spreadsheet. Over time, it was refined and enhanced and eventually, many of the more advanced functions were written in VBA, the programming language that comes with Microsoft Excel.

It soon became apparent that although Excel was able to perform all of the necessary calculations for property investment, it was not an easy tool to use. Excel based Investment Property analysers tend to be complex and not particularly intuitive

I was surprised to find that there were no free (or cheap) custom written investment property analysis software packages available to download. The few packages that were available were out of my price range, rather complex and not intuitive to use. So I figured what the heck, I’ll write one.

The current version, has features only seen in expensive commercial counterparts. For example the handling of multiple properties, improved depreciation and better reports.

The goal of EZ-Rent was for it to be as unbiased and easy to use as possible. I am not involved in the real estate industry in any way (except as an investor!). As a real estate investor, I was frustrated with the difficulty in finding truly free and unbiased resources in this industry. The decision to make EZ-Rent free for personal use is in part, my small contribution to try and address this imbalance.