BRRRR Spreadsheets and Templates: What Most of Them Leave Out

Search for a brrrr method spreadsheet and you will find plenty of free Excel and Google Sheets templates. The arithmetic in them is usually correct. What they get wrong is the list of lines, and a missing line is how a deal pencils on paper and then loses money in real life. Here is what a BRRRR deal analysis spreadsheet has to track, which cost lines thin templates skip, and when a sheet beats a web calculator.

What a BRRRR sheet has to track that a rental sheet does not

A rental spreadsheet has one loan and one set of operating numbers. Price, down payment, rent, expenses, payment, cash flow. You can build it in ten minutes.

A BRRRR sheet has two loans, two closings, and a stretch in the middle where the property earns nothing and costs money every month. That middle stretch is the whole difficulty, and it is what gets left out. A proper sheet needs columns a rental sheet never asks for: the short-term loan amount, its rate and points, the number of months you hold before the refinance funds, the monthly carrying cost while the house sits empty, the refinance loan-to-value, the refinance closing costs, and the payoff of the first loan. Miss any one and the cash out figure is fiction.

If you want the three stages written out line by line before you build anything, every line of the calculation is in the formula guide, and the five steps in order are in the glossary.

The cost lines missing from most free templates

Take the standard example on this site. Buy for $300,000, spend $60,000 on rehab, finish at a $500,000 after-repair value. Refinance at 75% and the new loan is $375,000. A thin template stops there: $360,000 in, $375,000 out, all your cash back plus $15,000 in your pocket.

Now add the lines that template skipped, using a hard money loan for 90% of the purchase at 11% with 2 points and a six month hold:

• Buyer closing costs at 2%: $6,000
• Points, 2 on a $270,000 loan: $5,400
• Six months of interest: $14,850
• Holding costs at $850 a month: $5,100
• Refinance closing at 3% of $375,000: $11,250

Total project cost is $391,350. The short-term loan covered $270,000 of it, so your cash in is $121,350. At the refinance you net $375,000 minus the $270,000 payoff minus $11,250 in costs, which is $93,750 back. You leave $27,600 in the deal.

That is a $42,600 swing from the template’s answer. Nothing exotic caused it. Five ordinary lines did. The same deal, carried all the way through to the rental, is in one deal from offer to cash out.

A few more lines worth their own row: a rehab contingency of 10 to 15% that you treat as already spent, appraisal and inspection fees, title on both closings, and any lender escrow set up at the refinance. Amounts vary by state and lender, so put your own quotes in rather than a template’s defaults.

Hard money interest: why a flat monthly figure is wrong

This is the single most common template error. One cell says financing cost, one number goes in it, and the number never moves.

Interest tracks the loan balance, and that balance grows as rehab draws fund. If the lender advances $270,000 at closing and funds $60,000 of rehab in draws, flat math on $330,000 for six months at 11% gives $18,150. With the rehab drawn across the first four months, the actual interest lands closer to $16,500. Some lenders charge on the full commitment from day one instead, which puts you back at the higher figure. Read the note and model what it says.

Hold length is the other half. Every extra month on $330,000 at 11% is about $3,025 of interest plus $850 of carry, so roughly $3,900 a month of pure delay cost. A hardcoded financing cell hides that completely. And points are not interest: 2 points on $270,000 is $5,400 paid at closing whether you hold two months or ten, so it belongs on its own row.

Where spreadsheets beat a web calculator, and where they lose

Sheets win on anything odd or ongoing. Your lender’s exact fee schedule. Back taxes, a tenant buyout, a utility reconnect. Three scenarios side by side on separate tabs. A draw schedule you update weekly. Budget against actual spend as the rehab runs, which no calculator can do for you. Records that still make sense two years later at tax time.

Sheets lose on solving backwards, and backwards is where the money is. Forward math answers what happens if I pay $300,000. The useful question is what is the most I can pay and still get every dollar back. Points, interest and closing costs all scale with the price, so the answer is circular. Goal Seek handles it if you wire it up correctly, and most downloads have not. The same goes for the after-repair value you would need for a full recovery: $391,350 divided by 0.75, then divided by 0.97 for closing costs, is about $537,900 on this deal, well above the $500,000 you expect. That gap is the $27,600 showing up a second way, and it tells you a deal with no cash left in needs a lower purchase price, not a better sheet.

The sensible split: screen and solve with the calculator, then keep a sheet for the deals you actually buy.

Building your own: the eight inputs that matter

1. Purchase price. Everything else scales off it.
2. Rehab budget, with a separate contingency row.
3. After-repair value, from comps. The pages for each after-repair value show what a given number supports.
4. Short-term loan: amount or loan-to-cost, rate, points, and whether interest accrues on draws or the full commitment.
5. Months held, measured from closing to the day the refinance funds. That is longer than the rehab.
6. Monthly holding costs. Taxes, insurance, utilities, lawn and snow, often 0.15 to 0.2% of the after-repair value per month.
7. Refinance terms: LTV, rate, amortization, closing cost percentage, and any seasoning wait.
8. Rent and operating expenses: vacancy, maintenance, capital expenditure, management, taxes, insurance.

Everything else on the sheet should be a formula, not a typed number.

Sanity checks to run before you make the offer

Change months held from six to nine. Total project cost should rise about $11,600. If it does not move, your interest is hardcoded.

Check that cash out subtracts the payoff: $375,000 minus $270,000 minus $11,250, not $375,000 minus $11,250.

Compare all-in to the after-repair value. Purchase plus rehab here is 72% of $500,000, and with soft costs it is 78%. That is the test behind the 70% screen, and 78% is why cash stays in.

Check the rental on the new loan. At $4,400 rent with 5% vacancy, $6,000 of taxes, $2,500 of insurance and 18% of collected rent for maintenance, reserves and management, net operating income is about $32,600 against $30,698 of annual payments at 7.25% over 30 years. That is a 1.06 ratio. Many lenders want 1.20 or better, and the bar varies, so confirm yours before you offer.

Run it both ways

Build the sheet for the deal you own. Use the BRRRR Calculator on the home page for the offer, since it works the max purchase price and the required after-repair value backwards from your own loan terms. Then put those answers in your sheet and track what really happens.