The #1 Real Estate Investment App for Beginners

Using the best real estate investment app is necessary for any beginner investor. You need one to compete in today’s real estate market.

Table of Contents

1. Mistakes Every Beginner Real Estate Investor Tends to Make
2. What Is the Best Real Estate Investment App & How Can It Help Beginners?

Investing in real estate isn’t as simple as it used to be. However, it is much easier if you use the best real estate investment app in the industry.

In today’s world of real estate investing, there are many different methods and strategies available to investors. However, it means you need more research, data, and analysis to make a successful investment.

Several real estate investment apps offer solutions and make things easier for beginner investors. It is important for these investors to find the best app that gives them an advantage over their competition.

In this article, we will talk about the most common mistakes beginner investors tend to make before discussing the best real estate investment apps you can start using today.

Related: How to Buy an Airbnb Investment Property With the Best Real Estate Investment App

Mistakes Every Beginner Real Estate Investor Tends to Make

Making a mistake when investing in real estate can be very costly. So, it is important that beginner investors learn from the mistakes of others instead of making their own.

Investing in real estate can be very intimidating to a beginner investor because it is easily one of the biggest commitments you can make. However, daring investors see beyond fear. They focus on making a substantial profit or generating a passive income through rental real estate investing.

Luckily, you won’t need to make mistakes in order to learn. Nowadays, it is possible to learn from the mistakes of others.

Before talking about the best real estate investment apps and the problems they solve, let’s talk about the mistakes and challenges that beginner investors often face.

Research Mistakes

The first step of any real estate investment should always be research and more research. Before you start investing, you need to do a lot of research about anything that you do not know enough about in relation to the investment that you want to make.

Additionally, you want to obtain all the required information about your own financial situation and the options available to you. So, before taking any steps toward a real estate investment, beginner investors should be able to answer the following questions:

How Much Cash Do I Have?

Of course, although there are advanced strategies that let you do so, as a beginner investor, you should not expect to invest without having any cash.

So, one of the first things that you need to find out is simple: how much cash do you have access to?

It depends entirely on your own unique situation and lifestyle. However, the cash that you can use for investing should still let you enjoy a comfortable lifestyle and should not be more than your capacity.

Since you will most likely be using a mortgage or a loan to make your real estate investment, the amount of available cash you want should be enough to make a down payment to get the loan.

If you find that you don’t have a sufficient amount of cash, consider liquidating some of your unneeded assets, like selling an extra car that you don’t need or disposing of some stuff online.

We do not recommend beginner investors invest more cash than they can handle, as profit from real estate investments will likely take time before it starts to come in.

What Mortgages Do I Qualify For?

Beginner investors may be able to access different types of real estate mortgages. Depending on your place of residence, civil status, credit score, and other variables, different types of loans are available to you.

Beginner investors should research online or consult a professional financier about their options, which can heavily influence their future investment decisions.

For example, some beginner investors might find that they only qualify for a 15-year loan instead of a 30-year loan. It can significantly affect their monthly cash flow from a rental real estate investment.

Read: How to Get a Mortgage for Investment Property: A Beginner’s Guide

Where Do I Want to Invest?

Another question that beginner investors need to answer is, where do they want to invest?

Some investors limit their search to the city or state that they live in, as it gives them easy access to the property they’re buying and lets them easily manage it.

Other investors choose to invest in locations that they find appealing or desirable to live in. They want to spend their vacation time in that property and effectively use it as a vacation home when they’re not renting it out.

Experienced investors, however, focus primarily on market stats and data to determine the most profitable market to invest in. They do so while accounting for the extra costs of property management and other location-specific factors.

It is very important to get a clear idea of what you want from your investment.

Do you want the ease of property management and to invest in the local market that is more familiar to you? Or do you want to invest in a beautiful beach house that you can rent out seasonally and use as a second home?

Many investors would argue that the best way to invest is to be data-driven with a focus on profit, which is the main driver behind most real estate investments.

Luckily, if you’re looking to invest based on data and analytics, the later sections of this article will tell you everything you need to know about the best investment apps for you.

Calculation Mistakes

One of the things that beginner investors need to learn about and be able to carry out is calculating the right property metrics to determine the potential of their real estate investment.

The metrics that you use in a real estate investment are not the same as the metrics you use for other types of investments. They also differ based on the strategy that you want to use.

The simplest type of real estate investment is buying a property and then selling it at a higher price for a profit. Calculating the return on investment in this case is quite simple as you’re making direct transactions with an obvious margin of profit.

Of course, you might want to do a fixer upper, which is the strategy of buying a distressed house for much lower than the market price. In such a strategy, you spend money to get it fixed and rehabilitated and then sell it at a market price.

In this case, you would need to include the cost of repairs and renovations to the amount you spent on buying the house before you’re able to calculate your profits from selling it.

When it comes to rental properties, however, things get slightly more complicated. Since rental real estate investments generate their profit over time, the metrics you want to use should account for that.

This is where two very important metrics are used: the capitalization rate and the cash on cash return. Beginner investors should learn about the two metrics and how to calculate them and use them effectively in order to make profitable real estate investments.

Luckily, the best real estate investment app offers insights around the cap rate and cash on cash return to help beginner investors get started quickly and learn along the way.

Choosing the Wrong App

Lastly, while this hasn’t always been an issue that investors face nowadays, one of the most important choices that beginners need to make is choosing the best real estate investment app to use.

Choosing the best investment app for you can be a challenge if you don’t know what each app offers and what sort of features you’re looking for. However, if you take your time to do the necessary research and planning for your investment, knowing what to look for in the best real estate investment app becomes much easier.

The internet is full of options when it comes to real estate investment apps. However, many of the options may not be useful. Some might even be counterproductive to use if they’re using inaccurate or outdated data.

Generally, there are two types of real estate investment apps that beginner investors might be looking for.

Some apps, such as Fundrise, allow investors to make real estate investments and diversify their investment portfolio all through the app.

The more popular type of app among beginner investors, however, is those that provide the investor with all the tools and features they need. Such an app gives them data and insights to help them make an informed real estate investment decision.

In the next section, we discuss the second type of real estate investment app. We will focus on Mashvisor as the best real estate investment app for beginner investors in the US.

Related: Real Estate Investing for Beginners: Learn From Other Investors’ Mistakes

What Is the Best Real Estate Investment App & How Can It Help Beginners?

The best real estate investment app for beginner investors should enable them to make investment decisions based on accurate insights, data, and analytics. With the necessary set of tools and features, the best tool should let investors do several things. They include searching for properties, analyzing markets, running comps, and calculating metrics quickly and easily.

When searching for the best tools to use, beginner investors often tend to use multiple tools for different functionalities instead of using a single tool that does it all. It is because they assume that such a tool wouldn’t exist. However, luckily for you, you just stumbled upon the best real estate investment app—Mashvisor.

Mashvisor is a real estate investment app that provides all of the tools and features that I mentioned above, specializing mainly in rental real estate investment analytics.

The platform includes tools that allow beginner investors to easily conduct market research and search for properties that match their exact investment criteria.

Additionally, what makes Mashvisor the best real estate investment app is that all of the tools and features are connected to one another to provide the best insights and calculations.

For example, Mashvisor’s property search feature is connected to the rental calculator, which means you’re able to search for properties based on return on investment metrics such as the cap rate.

So, let’s see how Mashvisor can help you during each stage of your real estate investment and what exactly makes it the best real estate investment app and rental property calculator.

Where Does Mashvisor’s Data Come From?

Before talking about the specific features that Mashvisor offers, it’s important to first talk about the data, where it comes from, and how accurate it is.

Mashvisor gathers its data from trusted sources that provide us with up-to-date and accurate real estate data that covers the majority of locations around the US. Our sources include multiple MLS from different states, which is the standard and most trusted source of real estate data in the industry.

Additionally, since we specialize in long-term and short-term rentals, Mashvisor gathers data from Airbnb to provide accurate and up-to-date short-term rental data and analytics.

Of course, all of the data that is gathered goes through a process to eliminate inaccuracies and further improve the quality of the insights that are provided.

One of the best things about Mashvisor’s insights is that instead of using means and averages, the app focuses on using medians when providing market-wide data. It is done to reduce the inaccuracies caused by outlying properties with values, prices, or rental rates that are far below or above the market’s averages.

Conducting Market Research

One of the biggest mistakes that beginner or amateur investors make is not conducting market research. It is often the case because beginner investors might not know where to access the data and information required to do real estate market research.

Luckily, the best real estate investment app lets even beginner investors be able to research any market in the US quickly and easily.

One of Mashvisor’s main features is a real estate heatmap tool that lets you search and get information about real estate markets, such as neighborhoods, cities, or entire states. The tool lets you get information about each market. The information includes the number of properties listed for sale, the median property price, and the average rental rates in that market.

It provides beginner investors with the required information that they need to decide on where they want to invest. Also, it lets them research smaller markets within their market of choice to further maximize their return on investment.

In addition, Mashvisor’s real estate investment app can also provide investors with data exports about the markets of their choice. The data exports will include more information about each market, including metrics from Mashvisor’s rental calculator AI, such as:

• Median property prices
• Price per square foot
• Number of listings for sale
• Days on the market
• Monthly long-term/short-term rental income
• Short-term rental daily rates
• Long-term/short-term rental cap rate
• Long-term/short-term rental cash on cash return
• Number of long-term rental listings
• Number of short-term rental listings
• Short-term rental occupancy rate
• Walk score

Click here to try out Mashvisor’s Property Search and heatmap tools.

Now, let’s see how Mashvisor can help you find the best investment property for you.

Finding Investment Properties

When searching for and finding investment properties in the US, Mashvisor is the best investment app that lets you do so with a great level of customization and many useful filters.

Using the same map tool mentioned earlier, beginner investors can zoom in to the neighborhood level on any location where they want to see individual properties that are listed for sale in that neighborhood or street.

By doing so, the information that you’re given about each property extends to include that property’s information, such as its size, age, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

It additionally shows you the rental income for each particular property, its market value, and a breakdown of its cap rate and cash on cash return for each rental strategy.

To help you narrow down your search and find properties that match your desired criteria, Mashvisor provides you with a wide range of filters that let you customize your search based on any of the data obtained about properties. As a beginner investor, it lets you easily and quickly find a couple of investment properties that are suitable for you in your market of choice.

The best part about it is, since it is connected to the rental calculator, the feature tells you what the return on investment will be if you invest in each property using metrics like the cap rate and cash on cash return.

To get even more analytics and insights about properties you’re interested in, all you need to do is click on a property on the map and you’ll be taken to that property’s analytics page.

Accessing Analytics

The real estate rental property analytics page that Mashvisor offers is one of the best in the industry. It provides a deep level of insights and analytics, and it does so in an easy-to-understand and effective way.

Additionally, each analytics page includes a rental calculator, as well as a mortgage calculator. Both calculators are customizable and interactive, allowing you to further personalize the insights, analytics, and calculations that you see on the page.

For example, the rental income calculator provides you with calculations about the monthly rental income of your property and how it translates to metrics like the cap rate.

The calculation considers all the first-time costs and recurring expenses that investors are expected to pay. it lets you customize the costs and expenses or add new ones to obtain the most accurate results based on your unique situation.

Similarly, the mortgage calculator lets you choose a type of mortgage, its duration, amount, and fixed or adjustable interest rate. The rental income calculator will immediately reflect the new information entered or the value adjusted. The mortgage will significantly affect the results that you see.

In addition, the analytics page of the Mashvisor app includes a table of rental comps for each property, which even shows you the level of similarity between properties that are being compared.

All of the above tools combined give beginner investors the ability to research real estate markets, find properties, and analyze them faster than ever before.

Bottom Line

Real estate investing has become harder to understand, but easier to execute if you’re using the best real estate investment apps that the market has to offer.

Whether you’re looking for a real estate app to help you research different markets, find the perfect property in your market of choice, or analyze properties to figure out their potential for profits – there is an app for everything.

But if you’re looking for an app that does it all and does it well, Mashvisor is the best real estate investment app for you. The app gives you access to all the market data and analytics that you need to conduct effective market research.

The tools that you will be using are also designed to help you find the best match for you in terms of real estate investment properties for sale.

With the deep level of insights and analytics provided by Mashvisor, any beginner investor will be able to analyze the investment property they want before making the commitment of buying it.

To get access to our real estate investment tools, click here to sign up for a 7-day free trial of Mashvisor today, followed by 15% off for life.