Orders in hand. Rent, buy, or house-hack with clarity.
Enter your installation, paygrade, and expected tour. RealDataEdge compares renting, buying and selling at your next PCS, and buying a duplex-to-fourplex you keep as a rental. Every number cites its source. Nothing is guessed on your behalf.
BAH from the DoD table · Rents from HUD and Census · No hidden forecasts · Not financial advice
One set of orders. Three ways to house your family.
Generic calculators answer rent versus buy. A PCS has a third door: buy a small multifamily, live in one unit while you’re stationed, and keep it as a rental when you leave. We put all three next to each other with the same inputs.
Rent
What a comparable home rents for in your housing area, anchored to HUD’s published rent for the bedroom count you need, against the BAH you’ll actually receive.
Buy, then sell at PCS
Equity built over the tour minus the cost of getting in and out. Commission and transfer taxes are inputs you set, and price change is a scenario you choose from the metro’s own history.
Buy, then keep as a rental
A duplex to fourplex with a VA loan and one unit yours. What you pay out of pocket while stationed, and what it cash-flows once every unit is rented and you’ve moved on.
Four steps from orders to an answer.
Ten minutes if you have your orders and a listing in hand. Less if you’re only deciding whether to look.
- 01
Enter your orders
Installation, paygrade, dependents, and expected tour length. Your BAH resolves from the published DoD table for that housing area. We never ask for your LES.
- 02
Choose your scenarios
Rent growth and price change are yours to pick from labeled ranges: the metro’s history, flat, and a downside. We show the history. We never bury a forecast in the math.
- 03
Read the comparison
Monthly out-of-pocket versus BAH, cash needed at move-in, net worth at the end of the tour for all three paths, and the tour length at which buying overtakes renting under the scenarios you chose. Every figure opens to its formula or its source.
- 04
Underwrite the building
Found a duplex, triplex, or fourplex? Add the listing, leases, tax bill, and insurance quote. We extract each figure with a page citation and model VA, FHA, and conventional financing side by side.
If we can’t source a number,
we leave it empty.
Not an industry average. Not a default appreciation rate. Not a guess dressed up with confidence. You see what’s missing as missing, and you decide what to assume. That’s the whole product.
Know the housing area before you sign.
Every installation gets a page with the data that actually moves your decision, pulled from the agencies that publish it. Each figure shows its source and the year it’s from.
Installation pages open with the first release. Join the waitlist to be told when yours is live.
| What you see | Source | Refreshed |
|---|---|---|
| BAH by paygrade and dependents | DoD, DTMO | Yearly |
| Fair market rent by bedroom count | HUD | Yearly |
| Median rent, home value, vacancy | Census ACS | Yearly |
| Metro home price index history | FHFA | Quarterly |
| Rent comps for a specific address | Licensed provider | On demand |
Two phases, one honest answer.
A house-hack is two different investments: the years you live there, and the years you don’t. We model both from the same documents.
Your unit, their rent, your BAH
- Monthly out-of-pocket after the other units’ rent, next to your BAH
- VA, FHA, and conventional side by side, with the funding fee or mortgage insurance each one carries
- Cash to close, and how lenders typically count the other units’ rent, flagged to confirm with yours
Every unit rented, you're gone
- Monthly cash flow with a management fee, vacancy, and reserves for a landlord who lives a time zone away
- Gross rent multiplier, the 1% rule, rent-to-value, and break-even occupancy
- A two-page PDF where every figure carries its source or its formula
Extraction reads the listing sheet, leases, tax bill, and insurance quote you upload. Each figure carries a citation back to the page it came from, and mismatches between documents are flagged before they reach your math.
Free to decide. Paid to underwrite.
The rent-vs-buy check is free, every time you get orders. You pay only when you have a real building to underwrite.
The three-way comparison, break-even tour length, sensitivity grids, and the installation’s market page.
Join the waitlistDocument extraction with citations, cross-document checks, three financing paths, both phases, and the PDF you can hand a lender or a spouse.
Join the waitlistBuilt for families who move on orders.
We’re validating the math on real orders and real listings before opening accounts. Leave your email and we’ll tell you when your installation’s page is live.
No lead selling. Your email goes to us and nowhere else.