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The prei Investor Workflow

How buy-and-hold investors move from market selection to deal analysis — and where each guide fits.

Overview

prei organizes investing into four stages. Each stage has a page, a job to do, and a guide that walks you through it:

Stage What you do Where Guide
1. Growth Areas Find markets with strong growth fundamentals /growth/, /growth-explorer/ Analyzing Growth Areas
2. Discovery Source distressed/foreclosure properties in those markets /discovery/ Discovering Properties
3. Screening Filter properties against your buy criteria /pipeline/screener/ Screening Properties
4. Underwriting Analyze deals financially before making an offer /pipeline/<pk>/, /brrrr/ Underwriting Deals

The flow is sequential but not mandatory — you can add properties manually, screen them, and skip straight to underwriting. The pages simply connect when you follow the full path.

Stage 1: Growth Areas

Goal: identify cities with rising employment, population, income, and school quality.

  • What is GACS? The Growth Area Composite Score — see the GACS Guide for a deep dive on the 7 weighted signals.
  • How to explore: use the Growth Explorer to analyze the top cities in any state, or browse the ranked Growth Areas list.
  • Data confidence: each score shows a confidence % — how many of the 7 signals have real data vs. defaults. Configure FRED_API_KEY and HUD_API_KEY for full coverage.
  • Limitations: scores use an experimental weighting model, and employment growth prefers county-level QCEW data with a state-level FRED fallback. Use GACS to rank markets, not to predict prices.

Stage 2: Discovery

Goal: source distressed and foreclosure properties in a chosen growth area.

  • Source types: HUD REO, USDA REO, VRM (VA REO), ATTOM pre-foreclosure, and County foreclosure notices — see Discovering Properties.
  • How it works: pick a growth area, choose which sources to query, and run discovery. Matching records become PipelineProperty records in your pipeline.
  • Results: discovery renders in-page on the discovery page with KPI cards and per-source results; a "View in Screener" button takes you to the screener. VRM scraping runs in a background thread when no VA listings exist yet.

Stage 3: Screening

Goal: filter pipeline properties against criteria you define.

  • Setting criteria: configure hard kills (state, property type, price, foreclosure status) and soft criteria (GACS score, gross yield, price-to-rent, year built, beds) at Screening Settings.
  • Hard vs. soft: a hard-kill failure removes the property immediately. Soft criteria deduct points from a starting score of 100 — properties with a final score ≥ 50 pass.
  • Review & act: the Screener shows pass/fail status, lets you filter, re-screen all, advance passed properties to underwriting, or kill properties with a reason.

Stage 4: Underwriting

Goal: decide whether a deal meets your return targets.

  • Pipeline underwriting: per-property analysis computes GPR, EGI, OpEx, NOI, cap rate, cash-on-cash, and a Max Allowable Offer (MAO) — see Underwriting Deals.
  • BRRRR calculator: standalone deal-level tool for the Buy-Rehab-Rent-Refi-Repeat strategy, with verdicts (Full Cycle / Partial Recycle / Capital Trap) and DSCR warnings — see Using the BRRRR Calculator.
  • Beyond underwriting: once a deal passes, move it to Offer → Due Diligence → Renovation → Closing in the pipeline kanban.
Growth Areas (/growth/)  ──►  Growth Explorer (/growth-explorer/)
        │  "Discover Properties" button
        ▼
Property Discovery (/discovery/?growth_area_id=X)
        │  POST → sources queried, results render in-page
        │  "View in Screener" button
        ▼
Pipeline Screener (/pipeline/screener/?growth_area_id=X)
        │  "→ Underwriting" action (passed properties)
        ▼
Pipeline Detail (/pipeline/<pk>/)  ──►  BRRRR Calculator (/brrrr/)  [standalone]
        │
        ▼
Offer → Due Diligence → Renovation → Closing  (pipeline kanban stages)