Tools
Read a deal
Someone hands you a glossy packet about a building or a business for sale. Drop it here, whatever it is: a PDF of any size, locked or not, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a photo of a page, or several at once. It copies the facts out, does the arithmetic with its working shown, lets you slide the loan terms and watch every figure move, writes what the packet says and leaves out, and answers your questions from the facts. It never says whether to buy. That is the line this whole site stands on, and it holds here too.
Free: one reading a month with ten follow up questions, and the arithmetic without limit. Resident members read as many as arrive.
Hand it the listing
Drop the file here, or
A PDF of any size, locked or not. A Word file, a spreadsheet, a photo of a page, or several at once. It is opened here in your browser; a password never leaves this device.
Or paste the summary page as text:
What happens: the facts are copied out of the document into boxes you can check. Then every figure is computed here, with its working shown, and you can move the loan terms and watch it change. Nothing about whether to buy.
How it reads
The file is opened in your own browser, where a password for a locked file is used and never sent anywhere; only the words on the pages, or small pictures of pages that have no words, travel to the server. The model copies the facts out of the document and nothing more; you see them in boxes, with the ones the document left empty set apart and a line on why each matters, and you can correct or fill any of them. From there every figure is arithmetic done on your own device: the cap rate, the loan payments, the coverage, the cash left, the rates and loan sizes at which the numbers change character, and a year by year path through the lease and its options. Each carries its formula and a plain sentence on what such a figure means, and all of it follows the sliders at once, with no model and no cost. One pass by the model then writes what no formula can: what the packet says, what it leaves out, the questions to ask, who confirms what, and the words a newcomer may not know. After that you can ask about the deal, and the answers come from the facts and figures on the page and nothing else. Everything written is held to the same rule as every answer on this site, and a reading that drifts into telling you what to do is withheld rather than shown.
Who it is for: a person weighing a first commercial property or a small business, who wants to understand the packet before paying a professional to tear it apart, and a professional who wants the arithmetic laid out with its working in a minute. The site keeps a count of what kinds of files it could not open and which facts documents most often leave out, and nothing else, so the next version opens more and asks better.