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The BRRRR strategy lives or dies on one number: how much of your capital comes back out at refinance. Enter the purchase, the rehab, the after-repair value, and the refinance terms to see what you recover and what the remaining capital earns.
These are estimates from the numbers you entered. Want them calculated from real comparable rentals for a specific address?
Run a free CMA →BRRRR — buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat — works by forcing appreciation through renovation, then pulling the created equity back out with a refinance so the same capital can buy the next property. When it works cleanly you end up owning a cash-flowing asset with little or none of your own money still in it.
Most refinance lenders cap cash-out at 70–75% of appraised value. That single constraint drives the whole strategy: to recover all your capital, your all-in cost must be at or below the refinance LTV percentage of ARV. At 75% LTV, an all-in of $195,000 on a $260,000 ARV works. An all-in of $215,000 doesn't — you'll leave roughly $20,000 in the deal.
| Step | Amount |
|---|---|
| Purchase price | $150,000 |
| Rehab | $45,000 |
| Purchase closing | $4,000 |
| Holding costs | $5,000 |
| All-in | $204,000 |
| ARV | $260,000 |
| Refinance at 75% LTV | $195,000 |
| Less refi closing | −$5,000 |
| Cash back | $190,000 |
| Cash left in deal | $14,000 |
All-in landed at 78.5% of ARV — slightly above the 75% target — so $14,000 stays in the deal. Not a failure, just a smaller repeat.
The rent number drives everything above. CompPilot pulls actual comparable rentals for any US address and returns a defensible rent range — plus cap rate, DSCR, cash flow, and a written market memo.
Get a free rental analysis →It's the guideline that your all-in cost — purchase plus rehab plus closing and holding — should stay at or below 75% of after-repair value. Since most cash-out refinances max at 70–75% LTV, staying under that line is what lets you pull essentially all your capital back out.
For an investment property, typically 70–75%. Some portfolio and DSCR lenders will go to 80% on strong borrowers or strong properties, usually at a rate premium. Conventional Fannie/Freddie investment cash-out is generally capped at 75% for a single-family.
Most lenders require 6–12 months of ownership before they'll base the loan on current appraised value rather than your purchase price. Some offer delayed financing or no-seasoning programs at higher cost. Confirm the requirement with your lender before you buy — it determines how long you're carrying the property on expensive short-term money.
If the refinance returns 100% of your capital, you own a cash-flowing property with zero of your own money in it. Return on invested capital is mathematically undefined — dividing by zero — which investors call an infinite return. In practice most deals leave something in, and that's fine.
It's harder than it was at 4% rates but not dead. Higher refinance rates compress cash flow, so the deals that work now need either a bigger spread between all-in cost and ARV, or stronger rent growth. The math is the same; the margin required is larger.
If you run a real estate blog, brokerage, lending, or property management site, you can embed this brrrr calculator free — two lines of HTML, no API key, no signup, unlimited page views. All the math runs in the visitor's browser, and it renders in an isolated shadow root so it can't collide with your site's styles.
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