BiggerPockets vs. Good Investment: What Each One Is For

Plenty of investors learned the business on BiggerPockets: the forums, the podcasts, the books and the calculators. So when you look at Good Investment, the useful question is which part of the buying decision each one covers. BiggerPockets is strongest on learning, community and the deal math. Good Investment is built for one specific question about the house in front of you: how is this home positioned to appreciate against comparable homes in its own market?

What BiggerPockets does

BiggerPockets calls itself the largest community of real estate investors in the world, and the community is the center of the product: forums, podcasts, books, courses and an annual conference, BPCON. Around it sit four kinds of tools.

• Deal calculators. The calculator suite covers rental property, BRRRR, fix and flip, short-term rental, rehab estimates, sell versus keep and landlord insurance. The rental property calculator takes the purchase, financing, rent and expense figures you enter and returns cash flow, cash-on-cash return, cap rate and longer-run return, with a printable report to show a lender or partner.
• Rent Estimator. Enter an address and the Rent Estimator finds similar rentals nearby and estimates rent from them. Pro unlocks the estimate.
• Market Finder. Market Finder compares US metro areas on year-over-year home price growth, rent-to-price ratio, affordability, population and unemployment, and keeps a list of recommended markets hand-picked by its team. Several of those metrics are Pro-only.
• Landlord and partner tools. BiggerPockets Pro adds lawyer-reviewed lease packages for all 50 states and partner discounts on investor loans, landlord insurance, property management software and bookkeeping.

What Good Investment does

Good Investment starts from an address. It values the home, estimates its rent, pulls comparable sales, and scores it out of 10 against comparable homes in its own local market. The score comes with a measured market edge, which is how far homes in that position have historically run ahead of or behind their market, and a confidence flag that says how much evidence stands behind the rank. The score is a model-generated estimate, not investment advice.

Around the score, every analysis carries:

• Value and rent. A national automated valuation with a confidence read, a flag when the list price sits well away from it, a rent estimate and comparable sales.
• The neighborhood. Price growth mapped neighborhood by neighborhood, below the ZIP code, with the home plotted on the map and the nearby neighborhoods ranked from fastest to slowest.
• The market. Sales and rental market reads: median price and rent, listings, days on market and month-over-month movement.
• Investor Return. A full return model with financing, vacancy and operating costs, a long-term or short-term rental toggle, monthly cash flow, equity, payoff and the sale, laid out month by month. It adds the home’s market edge to its market’s long-run growth to give an estimated appreciation pace, which you can adjust.
• A written summary and a share link. The opportunities and risks in plain language, and a link a partner or lender can open.

AVM disclosure: an AVM is an estimated sale price for a property. It is not the same as the opinion of value in an appraisal developed by a licensed appraiser under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice.

Side by side

Where the growth rate comes from

This is where the two tools differ most. A rental calculator projects your return from the numbers you give it, and one of those numbers is how fast the property will gain value. On a long hold that single input usually moves more dollars than the monthly cash flow does, so it decides more of the answer than any line of the expense sheet.

Market Finder gives you a good starting point for that input, the metro’s recent price growth. Homes inside one metro, and even inside one ZIP code, grow at different rates, though. Good Investment measures where the specific home sits against comparable homes in its own market and turns that into a measured edge on top of whatever the market does. In Investor Return, that edge plus the market’s long-run growth becomes the growth rate, and you can still move it to match your own view.

Here is Investor Return on a sample property. Change the price, the rent or the financing, or switch it to a short-term rental, and the return rebuilds as you type.

Which one to pick

Using both on one deal

The two fit together because the jobs line up in order. Choose a metro with Market Finder and the forums. Pull your shortlist of addresses in that metro and score each one in Good Investment to see which homes rank highest within their market, and where the evidence behind each rank is strongest. Then run the finalist through Investor Return, or through the BiggerPockets calculator you already know, and take the numbers back to the forum for a second opinion.

Pricing

BiggerPockets Pro lists at $390 a year, which it shows as $32.50 a month billed annually, and includes unlimited calculator use with shareable reports. Good Investment scores your first property free, with no card. After that, a single credit is $29 and packs of 5, 10 or 25 cost $99, $169 and $349; credits never expire and each one unlocks Investor Return on a home. Investor Unlimited is $39 a month or $349 a year, with unlimited analyses and no per-report charges. Current prices are on the pricing page.

To see where a home you are already looking at ranks in its own market, enter its address in the property appreciation analysis.

BiggerPockets is a trademark of its owner. This comparison is for informational purposes only and does not imply affiliation, endorsement or partnership.