What’s the Best Real Estate Comps Software?

Understanding the art of pulling comps will make or break you as a real estate investor. Pull the right ones, and you’ll land the best deals. Pull the wrong ones, and you’ll dive into a loss. Due to this importance, new investors often ask me: what’s the best real estate comps software?

The best real estate comps software should provide you access and search functionality with historical comps. Investors typically seek off-market properties, so they want to know what similar properties have sold for, not just the active list price. Our Investor’s Edge software does this and more.

I’ll discuss some more considerations about pulling real estate comps—and good software to do it—in the below article. Specifically, I’ll cover each of the following:

• The Importance of Comps for Real Estate Investors

• What to Look for in a Real Estate Comps Software

• Investor’s Edge Software

• Final Thoughts on Comps Software

The Importance of Comps for Real Estate Investors

When I started in real estate 20 years ago, I began as an agent. Honestly, I didn’t know where else to begin, and this seemed as good an option as anything. But I found out pretty quickly that I had access to information that experienced investors wanted.

As I established myself, investors began reaching out to me, asking if they could work as assistants. I realized that these people didn’t need the actual work, they just wanted access to my MLS subscription.

The Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, serves as the real estate resource that agents use to A) list properties for sellers, and B) find properties for buyers. Additionally, it retains records of historical transactions. For investors, this meant that the MLS could be used to find historical comps.

To successfully invest in residential real estate, you absolutely need reliable comps data. These comps tell you the historical sales prices of homes similar to a potential investment property. In other words, comps provide market reality for home values—not just the asking prices of optimistic sellers. With this information, investors can look at a potential deal and know A) what to offer, and B) when to say no.

What to Look for in a Real Estate Comps Software?

Today, you don’t need to be a real estate agent to access historical comps data. Seeing the value in this information, enterprising people and organizations have organized comps into software programs. However, whether an agent using the MLS or an investor subscribing to a software program, you will need to pay for this information.

This begs the question, what should you look for in real estate comps software? To answer this, I first need to explain what the MLS lacks. While this service does include some historical data, it’s focused on active comps. In other words, it provides you information on how sellers with MLS-listed properties are currently pricing their properties.

But as a real estate investor, you shouldn’t pursue MLS-listed properties. The most successful investors go after off-market deals, for two reasons. First, when you chase deals on the MLS, you need to compete against both primary homebuyers and fellow investors. This drives competition for deals through the roof. Second, MLS-listed properties rarely offer discounted prices. Instead, you’ll be scrolling through properties listed at or above market—not the environment to find a solid deal.

Basically, you want to find motivated sellers with equity in their properties who haven’t actually listed them for sale yet. To make an offer on these properties, active comps aren’t as useful. Instead, you need to compile reliable sold comps to optimally price your offer. As a result, here are some key characteristics you’ll want in any real estate comps software:

• Historical sales: You’ll need access to historical comps for your market. This means that, at a minimum, you’ll want to see all completed sales transactions within the last year. Ideally, the software will have older transactions too, as these can help you identify market trends.

• Search functionality: It doesn’t matter how much information comps software has if you can’t effectively search for it. A massive list of data does you no good. You’ll need the ability to actually use an internal search tool to quickly and efficiently find comps relevant to a particular deal.

• Filters: Directly related to search functionality, quality comps software will provide the ability to filter your searches. Quality comps need to as closely as possible replicate the target property. Accordingly, you should be able to filter your search results by bedroom, bathroom, square footage, home age, and location. This level of refinement will help you easily find relevant, quality comps.

• Bookmarking tool: As you search through your software and confirm solid comps, it would be a tremendous hassle to have to handwrite all of that information. A solid comps software should make your life easier, not harder. This means that your comps software should have the ability to bookmark individual comps. That way, as you’re compiling a list for a potential deal, you can quickly reference and sort all of the comps you’ve found. Then, you can narrow down these bookmarked comps into a list of the top three or four to price an offer.

The Investor’s Edge Software 

The Investor’s Edge software includes all of the above characteristics and more! We’ve poured all of our team’s collective knowledge and experience into building the best possible real estate comps software. Here’s a snapshot of the powerful functionality this tool provides:

• Search for deals: We include a searchable, filtered database of over 160 million properties, both on- and off-market. This means that for any potential deal, you can quickly look up: 1) historical sales data for that property; 2) historical comps for that potential deal; and 3) property-specific data like tax records, MLS info on current listings, agent’s contact information, pictures, and remarks.

• Bookmark favorites: As you find potential deals and historical comps in our database, Investor’s Edge lets you bookmark and organize properties. This gives you a quick and easy way to review all of the properties relevant to a potential deal.

• Instantly market: This is where Investor’s Edge really sets itself apart from other real estate comps software. After you’ve identified a potential deal and the associated comps, our software lets you market directly to the property owner. You can print postcards with pre-filled addresses or send voicemails to your saved deals. This gives you the ability to quickly and efficiently convert leads into deals.

Final Thoughts on Comps Software

Regardless what real estate comps software you choose, you’ll need to pay for access. While plenty of options exist, we firmly believe that The Investor’s Edge best supports the needs of real estate investors. We’ve compiled a comprehensive database of properties throughout the United States. This information includes all the historical comps data you’ll need to analyze potential deals, plus more.

Finally, our software’s direct marketing functionality provides you a high-quality means to convert property leads into closed deals. At the end of the day, we strive to give you the best possible tools to profitably invest in real estate, and we believe Investor’s Edge accomplishes this goal. Armed with this software, we’re confident that you can make every day a profitable day!

Learn how to make money flipping real estate with us by attending our next webinar.