Free ARV calculator

After repair value is the price a property would sell for on the open market once a planned renovation is finished. Not what it's worth today, and not what the work costs. It's a forecast about a house that doesn't exist yet, made from evidence about houses that do: recent sales of comparable homes already at the finish level you intend to reach.

It matters because it's the only revenue figure in a project. Every cost, purchase, renovation, financing, holding, selling, is measured against it, and the maximum you can pay is derived from it by subtraction. An ARV that's 5% optimistic doesn't cost you 5%; it costs you most of the margin, because the error lands entirely on the revenue side while every cost stays where it was.

The multiplication is trivial. All of the work is in the first term. Deciding which sales describe the house you'll be handing back to the market. In practice:

• Set the search box first half a mile, six months, within about 20% of your square footage, same property type: before you look at any sales.
• Take closed sales only. Asking prices are opinions; pending sales aren't confirmed.
• Filter to renovated sales. This is the step that makes it an ARV rather than a valuation. You want comps like the house you'll be selling, not like the one you're buying.
• Take the median price per square foot, not the average and certainly not the best comp.
• Multiply, then state a range from your lowest and highest comp. The range is what the neighborhood's own sales disagree by, and quoting it is the cheapest protection against over-trusting a point estimate.

Step by step with a full comp table and the adjustments, see how to calculate ARV. For where the sold data lives and what qualifies as a comp, how to find real estate comps.

Five renovated comps within half a mile sold at $218, $236, $241, $243 and $253 per square foot. The median is $241. The subject is 1,600 ft² and needs $55,000 of work.

The $115,680 the rule holds back is not profit. It has to cover about $23,000 of selling costs, $14,500 of holding, $4,500 of buying costs, and only then your margin. That's the arithmetic behind the 70%.

Six filters decide what's in the set, and one of them is specific to ARV:

Throw out non-arm's-length transfers, foreclosures, sales with heavy seller concessions, and any comp with a feature yours won't have. And never count basement or garage-conversion square footage: below-grade space doesn't sell at above-grade rates, and folding it in inflates every figure downstream.

The full process on one address is in how to run comps on a property.

For a wholesaler, ARV isn't your number: it's your buyer's. They'll pay about 70% of ARV minus repairs, so your contract price is that ceiling minus your assignment fee. On the example above, that's $214,920 less a $12,000 fee, or a maximum contract price of $202,920.

Which means the errors aren't symmetric. An ARV that's low costs you a deal you might have won; an ARV that's high ties up a property no cash buyer will take the assignment on, and you lose the deposit, the time, and the seller relationship. Comp toward the low end, and put the uncertainty in the repair contingency where it belongs: ARV for wholesaling covers estimating it when you can't get inside, and how much should a wholesaler offer covers the full ladder down to the offer.

For a flipper, ARV is the sale price the entire project is underwritten against, so the discipline is matching your comps to the scope you'll actually deliver. A cosmetic refresh comped against full renovations is how a $28,000 budget gets paired with a $60,000 value increase on paper.

It also has to clear an appraisal if your buyer is financing, and appraisers use the same neighborhood sales you did. An ARV built on the two best sales in the area is where deals fall apart three weeks before closing. See ARV for fix and flip for the sensitivity table, and the flip profit calculator for the whole project.

Market value is what the property is worth today, in its current condition. ARV is what it will be worth after renovation. Both come from comparable sales; the difference is which sales: market value uses comps in similar condition, ARV uses renovated ones.

The gap between them is not your profit. On the example above, a $280,000 as-is value against a $385,600 ARV leaves $105,600, and the $55,000 renovation plus roughly $42,000 of buying, holding and selling costs have first claim on it. That's why buying at market value and renovating produces almost nothing, and why the offer has to sit well below today's value. Full comparison: ARV vs market value.

• Comping against unrenovated sales. You get the value of the house you're buying, not the one you're selling, and the whole renovation vanishes from the math.
• Using list prices instead of closed sales. In a soft market this runs 4–8% high across the board.
• Counting below-grade square footage. Basements and garage conversions don't sell at above-grade rates.
• Anchoring on the best comp. If you can't say specifically why your finished house beats the median, use the median.
• Crossing an invisible boundary. School zones, municipal lines and flood-zone edges move value 10% over one street with no visible change in the housing.
• Treating ARV minus purchase minus rehab as profit. It isn't. Holding and selling costs come out of that gap first.