Q. I see some other real estate investment software selling for $100 to $200. It seems to do about the same as your REIA, so why should I pay $495?

A. Not everything that looks the same really is the same, of course. There are quite a few reasons why you would want to choose the Professional Edition of REIA over these others:

• Basic features are just that – basic. Our Professional edition goes well beyond the basics and addresses the more demanding needs you encounter in real deals.
  
  
  • You can model commercial income scenarios, for example, with mid-year escalations, abatements, rollovers, expense pass-throughs, tenant improvements, commissions, and more.
  • You can mix and match numerous financing options.
  • You can easily set up partnership analyses and give each prospective equity partner his or her own pro-forma.
  • Of course, is basic is all you need, we can do that too – with our Quick Summary Analysis in REIA Professional, or with our $99 Ultra-Lite version.
    
    
• All spreadsheet-based software is not created equal. Lots of people can write Excel formulas, but that doesn’t make them software developers.

REIA Professional presents you with a clean and manageable user interface and enormous power because it uses thousands of formulas that are hidden from view, as well as more than 10,000 lines of embedded Visual Basic programming code. That code makes it possible for you to use REIA like the professional application it is, not just a spreadsheet. You can enter commercial rental units into a database with a few clicks, print perfectly formatted reports singly or in groups, run our proprietary goal-seeking function and much more.

Q. OK, I believe you – the software is outstanding – but what about the company behind it?

A. We think that there are at least two key qualities about our company that make us stand out from everyone in the real estate investment software marketplace.

• We started RealData in 1981 and released the first version of REIA in 1982. The software industry doesn’t tolerate mediocre products or service very well, so we think our longevity says a lot. Younger companies may promise earnestly to be there for you when you need help, but no one in or field can say they’ve done it longer or better than we have.
  
  
• Longevity suggests another attribute we can be proud of: adaptability. We started in the days before Windows, indeed in the days before MS-DOS, and we’ve adapted and grown with every new chapter in computer technology.

Excel 2007 and the Vista operating system present enormous challenges to developers of sophisticated Excel-based products. What follows after XL2007 and Vista will be even more daunting. The best measure of our promise to be here for you tomorrow is how well we’ve kept that promise in the past.

In addition, we’re a real software company with real, full-time support personnel and programmers. We also have decades of real-life experience with real estate investing – we’re not brokers or accountants or appraisers in our day jobs running a business on the side at night.

Q. I’ve also seen real estate investment and development software that costs 10 times as much or more than RealData’s products. Do those applications do anything more than yours?

A. For 10 times the price, we certainly hope so! Most of the “high-end” products in this field have a particular strength that allows them to stand out, both in some aspect of functionality and in price.

For example, there is one that can allow you to structure virtually any type of lease analysis you can possibly imagine. If that’s what you need, then that’s the program you should use. REIA Professional, as well as our development programs Commercial/Industrial Real Estate and On Schedule, have been designed to strike a practical balance between features and ease-of-use. Over the years our customers have told us that they would like to us this new feature or that, but at the same time not so many that we create a daunting learning curve. Happily, we think we’ve struck that balance.