The story behind BRIX Calc
I'm David van Dijk. I have been investing in property for over eight years, as a landlord and as a developer. BRIX Calc is the tool I kept looking for and never found.
David van Dijk
Founder BRIX Calc
Every project started the same way: a new tab, the formulas from the last project next to it, and the hope that no cell had broken along the way. A sheet like that grows with your portfolio, but it does not get any better. At some point I had had enough. Not because Excel cannot do the maths, but because I kept checking whether my model still held up instead of looking at the building.
A sheet gives you numbers. What it does not give you is an overview. Where does your money go, which cost line is eating your return, what happens if the interest rate moves up half a percent. I wanted a tool that shows that. Not a table to decipher, but a picture that tells you at a glance where the project stands.
Plenty of investors work on instinct, and it often serves them well. Anyone who has viewed a hundred properties can feel what a street is worth. There is nothing wrong with that. But the moment you want to go a step further, with financing, with several properties, with someone else's money, instinct is no longer enough. You have to be able to back it up. And if you want to get further in property on the numbers, this kind of tool is indispensable.
You look at your return. The lender looks at DSCR, LTV and ICR. An investor looks at the IRR and at what comes back out of the cash they put in over the hold period. Those are three different conversations about the same building, and you need all three. BRIX Calc works those metrics out side by side, so you walk into every conversation with the numbers that count there.
Stamp Duty, acquisition costs, the survey, professional fees, a void between two tenants, interest during the works. None of them exciting on their own, together often the difference between a deal that pays and a deal that costs you. A tool that asks for them every time does not let them slip.
At some point I started looking at property abroad. What held me up was not the maths but the tax rules. Every country has its own transfer tax, its own surcharges for foreign buyers and its own acquisition costs. What is a banded table with two stacking surcharges in England is a flat percentage in the Netherlands and a regional matter in Spain. I put a lot of time into working that out, and it seemed a waste to leave it sitting in my own spreadsheet. That is why BRIX Calc runs the main markets in the right currency and under the rules of that country.
BRIX Calc did not come about on my own. The property community helped me enormously. During the testing phase more than 25 enthusiastic investors and developers looked over my shoulder, ran their own projects through it and told me what was wrong. A large part of what is in there now is there because someone asked for it.
That is what it comes down to in the end. With a project you have actually worked through, you walk into a very different conversation. You sit down with a private investor and show them where their money goes, what they get out of it and what happens if things go against you. That builds trust, and it saves a lot of back and forth afterwards.
I am still open to feedback. Run into something, or missing a feature that would make your work easier? Send it over. That is how most of this got built.
Send a feature request or bug reportYou start free with one project. No payment details needed.