It's 9 p.m. and your inbox has forty-three leads in it. A skip-traced list from last week. Three replies to your texts. A PPC lead that came in an hour ago. A wholesaler's "smoking hot" email blast with eleven addresses. You know the math says most of these are garbage. You also know one of them might be the deal that pays for your month.
So you do one of two things. Either you open the first one, pull comps, build a full rehab estimate, model the hold, and forty minutes later you've analyzed exactly one property — and it didn't even work. Or you skip the math entirely, fire off lowball offers on gut feel, and spend your week chasing sellers who were never going to sell at your number.
Both traps cost you the same thing: the good deal that was sitting three leads down, waiting for someone to notice it.
The fix isn't more discipline. It's a faster filter. You don't need to underwrite every deal to death — you need a 60-second screen that tells you which deals deserve the 40 minutes and which ones go in the trash. This is that screen.
The mindset: triage, not diligence
A first-pass underwrite is not your final number. It will not be the number you put in a contract, and it should never be the number you wire money against. Its only job is to sort leads into three buckets:
- Green — the math clearly works. Pick up the phone, make the offer, do the real diligence next.
- Yellow — it's close. Maybe there's room, maybe not. Worth a second look when you have time.
- Red — the numbers don't move no matter how you squint. Archive it and move on.
The whole point is to be wrong cheaply. A 60-second screen that misclassifies a deal costs you a minute. A 40-minute deep dive on a deal that was always a "red" costs you the thirty other leads you didn't get to. Speed is the strategy.
The four inputs that actually matter
Most over-analysis comes from chasing inputs that don't change the answer. For a first pass, you need exactly four things:
- ARV — what the property is worth fixed up, based on recent comparable sales.
- Repair ballpark — a rough rehab cost, in broad tiers, not a line-item bid.
- Your buy formula — the 70% rule or a margin-based MAO (maximum allowable offer).
- The ask — what the seller wants, or your estimate of where they'd go.
That's it. Square footage, beds, baths, and lot size feed into the first two, but you're not pricing trim packages here. You're answering one question: is there a plausible spread between what I'd pay and what it's worth?
Step 1: ARV in 15 seconds
ARV is the anchor, and it's where people waste the most time. For a screen, you don't need a perfect appraisal — you need a defensible range. Pull three to five recent sales (last 6 months, same neighborhood, similar size and style) and take a price-per-square-foot read.
Say comparable sales are landing between $185 and $205 per square foot. The subject is 1,500 sq ft. That's roughly $277,000 to $307,000 fixed up. For a fast pass, anchor to the conservative-to-middle end — call ARV $290,000. If you can't find a single clean comp, that's not a yellow, that's a flag: thin comps make the whole screen unreliable, and that's a reason to slow down, not speed up.
Step 2: Repairs in broad tiers
You can't see inside the house from your desk, so stop pretending you can price the kitchen. Use tiers based on age, photos, and what the seller said:
- Cosmetic (paint, carpet, fixtures): roughly $15–$25/sq ft
- Moderate (kitchen, baths, some systems): roughly $30–$45/sq ft
- Heavy (full gut, roof, mechanicals, foundation question marks): $50/sq ft and up
Our 1,500 sq ft subject is a tired 1980s rental the seller called "needs updating." Call it moderate — say $40/sq ft, or about $60,000. Round generously. A first-pass repair number that's too low is how good-looking deals turn into bad ones, so when in doubt, push it up a tier.
Step 3: Run the buy formula
For a flip or a wholesale, the workhorse is the 70% rule:
Maximum Allowable Offer = (ARV × 70%) − Repairs
Plug in our numbers:
- ARV: $290,000
- 70% of ARV: $203,000
- Minus repairs: $203,000 − $60,000 = $143,000 MAO
That $143,000 is the most you'd pay and still leave room for your profit, holding costs, closing, and a wholesale assignment fee — all baked into that 30% haircut. If you're wholesaling, you'd want to lock it up a meaningful margin below that so your end-buyer still sees a deal, so your contract price might be $130,000 or under.
Now compare to the ask. If the seller wants $135,000, you're green — there's a plausible path. If they want $185,000, you're red, and no amount of staring at comps changes that. If they want $150,000, you're yellow: it's $7K over your MAO, which is close enough that a motivated seller, a sharper repair number, or a slightly higher ARV could close the gap.
Step 4: The 10-second cash-flow check for holds
If you buy rentals, add one quick test before you decide. You don't need a full pro forma — you need to know if the rent is in the same universe as the purchase.
Use the 1% rule as a smell test: monthly rent should be at least 1% of your all-in cost. If our subject rents for $1,900 and your all-in (purchase plus repairs) lands around $200,000, that's 0.95% — borderline. Then sanity-check cash flow with a rough operating cut: figure expenses (taxes, insurance, vacancy, maintenance, management) eat roughly 45–50% of rent. So $1,900 rent leaves about $1,000 to cover debt service. If your mortgage payment is $1,150, you're bleeding monthly — red for a hold even if it might pencil as a flip.
The 1% rule isn't gospel, and it breaks in low-cap, high-appreciation markets. But as a screen, it instantly tells you whether to keep going or kill it.
Putting it together: the worked example
Let's run the full 60 seconds on our 1980s rental:
- ARV: $290,000 (1,500 sq ft × ~$193/sq ft, conservative)
- Repairs: $60,000 (moderate tier, $40/sq ft, rounded up)
- MAO (70% rule): $203,000 − $60,000 = $143,000
- Wholesale target: ~$130,000 to leave buyer margin
- Seller's ask: $138,000
Verdict: green. The ask sits below your MAO with room for an assignment fee. This one earns the 40-minute deep dive — real comps, a contractor walk-through, title, the works. The other forty leads in your inbox just got easier to ignore.
Change one number and watch it flip. If the seller's ask were $160,000, you're red — $17K over MAO with no obvious lever. If repairs came in at "heavy" ($75K), your MAO drops to $128,000 and that $138K ask becomes a yellow at best. That sensitivity is exactly why the screen works: a single bad input usually moves the verdict, so you find out in seconds whether a deal is fragile or solid.
When to stop screening and start digging
The 60-second filter is built to be fast, which means it's built to be wrong in specific, predictable ways. Slow down and do real work when:
- Comps are thin or scattered. A wide ARV range means your MAO is a guess. Pull the actual sales before you trust the number.
- The repair tier is ambiguous. "Needs updating" can mean $20K or $90K. If the verdict hinges on which tier, you need eyes on the property.
- It's a yellow. Yellows are exactly the deals where the next 30 minutes earns its keep. Greens you act on; reds you drop; yellows you investigate.
- The strategy is exotic. Creative finance, subject-to, and seller-financed deals don't fit the 70% rule — their math lives in terms, not just price, and deserves their own model.
The screen tells you where to spend your diligence, not whether to skip it. Final underwriting still happens. It just happens on the three deals that earned it instead of all forty-three.
Making 60 seconds feel like 5
The honest catch with any fast filter is that the inputs still take time to gather. Pulling clean comps, reading per-square-foot, eyeballing a repair tier — do it by hand and your "60-second screen" quietly becomes a ten-minute one, lead after lead.
That's the part worth automating. Inside PropQuest, deal analysis pulls recent comparable sales, estimates ARV, and runs the 70% rule and rent checks the moment you open a property — so the red/yellow/green verdict is sitting there before you've finished reading the address. You're not doing the math; you're sanity-checking math that's already done, then deciding which deals are worth your real attention. The framework above is the logic. The point of having it run automatically is that you get to spend your evening on the three deals that matter instead of the forty that don't.
Build the filter. Trust it to triage. Then go do the deep work where it actually pays off.
