ARDOtools

House Flip Profit Calculator

Add up everything a flip costs — purchase, renovation, closing, holding, selling and the rest — and see what is left of the sale price once all of it is paid.

Inputs

Result

Planning estimate only. Replace assumptions with your real costs, contracts, taxes, and market conditions.

How it works

  1. Enter the buy and the budget

    Purchase price and what the renovation will realistically cost — which, for anything older or structural, is not the number the first quote says.

  2. Add the costs that are not the build

    Transfer tax and legal fees at purchase, then holding and financing as a single lump sum covering the whole period you own it. There is no field for the number of months, so work out the monthly burn yourself and enter the total.

  3. Read the profit

    Selling costs are taken as a percentage of the sale price and added to everything else; what remains is the profit. The tool shows that figure and the total project cost, and both are before tax.

Who this is for

Deciding what to bid

The calculator runs forwards, so work backwards by hand: keep lowering the purchase price until the profit reaches the number that makes the risk worth taking. The price where that happens is your ceiling, not your opening offer.

Sanity-checking a renovation budget

Overruns eat the margin first and the profit second. Running the same deal at the budget and at the budget plus twenty percent shows how much room there actually is.

Costing a delay

Holding costs accrue whether or not work is happening. Adding three months of them to the holding figure prices a delay before it occurs rather than after.

Comparing two projects

A bigger profit on far more capital and far more time is not necessarily the better one. Divide each profit by its total cost before choosing.

Questions

What should I budget for overruns?
A contingency of 10 to 20 percent of the renovation budget is a common rule, higher for older properties or anything structural. Projects that discover problems discover them after you own the building.
What are holding costs?
Everything you pay while you own it and it earns nothing: finance, insurance, utilities, council tax or rates, security. They scale with time, which is why delays hurt more than they look.
How is the return on investment worked out?
Profit divided by the total project cost, shown as a percentage. It is worth looking at: the same profit on half the capital is a completely different deal, and profit alone cannot tell two projects apart. It is a return on everything spent, not on the cash you put in, so a flip financed with a loan has a different return on your own money: usually higher than this figure when the project makes a profit, and a bigger loss when it does not.
Why does the profit look smaller than price minus costs?
Because selling is not free. Agent commission, legal fees and any finance exit charge come off the sale, not off the purchase, and they are calculated here as a percentage of the sale price rather than a flat amount.
What is the 70 percent rule?
A rough screen used by flippers: pay no more than 70 percent of the expected resale value, minus the renovation cost. It is a filter for deciding which deals are worth modelling properly, not a substitute for doing so — this calculator is the modelling part.
Does this account for tax on the profit?
No. Flip profits are taxed very differently depending on where you are and whether you trade as an individual or a company. Treat the result as pre-tax.
How is the 70 percent rule offer worked out?
Seventy percent of the expected sale price, minus the renovation budget. At the defaults that is 0.7 times 300,000 minus 45,000, which is 165,000 dollars. If your purchase price is above it, the deal is outside the rule, though the rule ignores holding and selling costs, so a deal can pass it and still lose money.
What is the break-even sale price?
The lowest sale price at which the project makes no loss once selling costs are taken off. Everything spent before the sale is divided by one minus the selling percentage. The result panel also shows the profit if the house sells five percent lower, which is the quickest check on how thin the deal is.