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Back40

FAQ & Help Guide
Not Financial Advice

How to use this page

Every tool in Back40, walked through question by question. Search or jump to a section, click any question to expand it. This page gets updated every time a feature is added or changed, so it should always match what's actually in the app. Looking to decide which tools to buy? See the services & pricing comparison →.
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🚀 Getting Started

Accounts, subscriptions, and how the five tools fit together.
What is Back40, and what does each tool actually do?

Back40 is a set of five connected tools for evaluating and tracking real estate deals — everything shares one account, so a deal you save in one tool can show up and be worked from any of the others.

  • Wholesale — the fastest path from a listing agent's phone call to a justified cash offer, built around a wholesaling deal (get it under contract cheap, assign the contract to a buyer for a fee).
  • Underwriter — a deeper deal-analysis tool with nine different calculators for other strategies: new-build multifamily, house flips, new-build SFH, land subdivision, self-storage development, buying an existing rental portfolio, a quick multifamily napkin/MAO analysis, seller-financed "slow flip" note arbitrage, and a standalone loan calculator.
  • Deals & Contacts — the built-in CRM. Every seller, agent, lender, buyer, or contractor you talk to lives here, linked to whichever deals they're connected to.
  • Deal Feed — a running log of every lead you're working, from any source, with pipeline stage, profit potential, and follow-up reminders in one table.
  • Settings — where you connect your own Airtable base and/or Google Sheet once, so every tool can export to them automatically.

You can jump between all of them any time from the nav bar at the top of every page.

Do I need an account, and what's included in each plan?

Yes — every tool requires signing in with an active or trialing subscription. There are three plans:

  • Underwriter — $47/mo: all nine Underwriter calculators, save & export deals (Excel/CSV), Airtable sync.
  • Underwriter + Deal Feed — $97/mo (most popular): everything above, plus Deal Feed and the Deals & Contacts CRM.
  • Pro / Team — $197/mo: everything above, plus multiple team seats, priority deal alerts, and the Pro-only AI features (like "🤖 Summarize a Conversation" on Wholesale).

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial. You can start the trial without a card, or add a card up front to lock in 15% off for as long as you stay subscribed.

How do I sign in if I forget my password?

On the sign-in screen, click "Email me a sign-in link instead" and enter your email — you'll get a link that signs you straight in without needing your password at all.

Can I install Back40 like an app on my phone?

Yes. Back40 works as a Progressive Web App — open it in your phone's browser and use "Add to Home Screen" (Safari) or "Install app" (Chrome/Android) to get an app icon that opens straight in, no App Store needed.

Is anything in Back40 financial, legal, or investment advice?

No. Every number the app produces — offer prices, ARVs, zoning capacity checks, profit projections — is an estimate built from what you type in. Always verify zoning, financing terms, and comps independently before acting on them. You'll see a "Not Financial Advice" badge on most pages as a reminder.

🤝 Wholesale Offer Calculator

Turning a discovery call into a justified offer, fast.
What's the four-tab workflow (Discovery Call → Offer Calculator → Close Call → Email)?

The Wholesale page is built as one continuous flow for a single deal:

  1. Discovery Call — the script to run live with the listing agent on your first call: motivation, condition, major issues, the agent's own ARV guess, price flexibility, and timeline. A few answers here feed straight into the calculator automatically.
  2. Offer Calculator — turns those answers into ARV, repair costs, and a justified Max Offer to Seller, with a full exit-strategy comparison (Wholesale/Flip/JV/BRRRR).
  3. Close Call & Objections — a script for calling the agent back the same day to present the offer, plus ready-made responses to the three most common objections.
  4. Email — auto-drafts an email to the listing agent, a cash buyer, or your own team, pulling live from everything you entered on the first two tabs.

Everything is tied together — change a number on the Offer Calculator tab and the Close Call script and Email draft update to match.

How is my Max Offer to Seller actually calculated?

In plain terms: Offer = ARV − Repair Costs − Selling/Closing Costs − Holding Costs − Your Cash Buyer's Minimum Profit − Your Wholesale Fee. Each of those five deductions is its own section on the Offer Calculator tab, so you can see exactly how the final number was built and adjust any piece of it.

A reference "70% Rule" box (ARV × 70% − repairs) is also shown for comparison, but the app is explicit that it's a rough gut-check only — the real offer above accounts for actual closing costs, holding costs, and your buyer's real profit requirement, which the 70% rule ignores.

That calculated number is your ceiling — the most you'd want to pay — not necessarily what you should actually offer. See the next question if the seller has told you a lower number.

What if the seller's list price or stated floor is below my calculated offer?

Enter the List price and/or Agent-stated floor on Step 10 of the Discovery Call tab. If either is lower than your calculated Max Offer to Seller, a "💰 You don't need to offer your full ceiling" banner appears right under the headline numbers on the Offer Calculator tab, showing exactly how much extra profit you keep by offering the seller's real number instead of your full ceiling. If both fields are filled in, it always uses whichever of the two is lower — the seller's real floor is never above their own list price.

For the standard wholesale exit, the extra-profit number is exact (it recomputes your assignment fee at the lower acquisition price while keeping your cash buyer's required profit intact). For Flip/JV/BRRRR it's a close estimate, since those strategies' financing costs also scale a bit with the acquisition price.

If your calculated offer comes out below what the seller wants instead, you'll see a different warning telling you to justify the gap with repairs/condition or negotiate on terms rather than price.

How does the repair cost estimate work?

It starts from square footage × a $/sqft rate you set (ask your cash buyers what they typically budget per square foot). On top of that, checking any "major issue" box from the Discovery Call (HVAC, electrical, plumbing) adds a flat dollar amount, and any recent upgrades subtract a credit. Roof and foundation are priced differently — since those costs scale with the size of the house, each is estimated at roughly $6 per square foot instead of a flat number.

If you have an actual contractor bid, you can type your own number directly into the "Final repair budget" field — once you do, the calculator always uses your number instead of recalculating it automatically.

How do I build an ARV from real comps?

Use the comp-site buttons ("Pull comps for this address") to open Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, Homes.com, or Propwire pre-filled (or copy-pasted) with your subject address, then enter each comp's sold price and square footage into the Comps Worksheet table — or use the "🤖 Paste Comps" button (see below) to fill in several at once instead of typing them by hand. It auto-flags rows as a size "Match" based on how close their sqft is to your subject property, but nothing counts toward your ARV until you tick its "Include" checkbox — so the final comp set is always your own judgment call. Once you've included your comps, click "Use as ARV" to push the suggested average straight into the ARV field.

Until you do, the ARV field auto-suggests a rough starting number — 150% of whatever's in the "List price" field, or $0 if there's no list price yet — so it's never left showing a made-up flat number on a deal it doesn't apply to. That auto-suggestion updates live as you change the list price, right up until you type your own number into ARV directly (or click "Use as ARV") — from then on your value sticks and is never silently overwritten.

What do "🤖 Paste a Listing" and "🤖 Paste Comps" do?

Two AI-powered shortcuts that fill in fields for you instead of typing them by hand. Paste a Listing (next to the Property field at the top) takes either a Zillow/Redfin link or the listing's copied text, and fills in the address, list price, sqft, beds/baths, lot size, year built, MLS number, and — when the listing agent/broker's name, phone, or email is mentioned in the text — the "Listing agent / broker" fields too, all after showing you an editable review step, so nothing lands in your real form until you confirm it. Paste Comps (on the Offer Calculator tab, next to the Comps Worksheet) does the same for one or more sold comps at once — paste the text, review the extracted price/sqft rows, and add them straight into the table.

One honest limitation on the URL option: Zillow and Redfin both actively block automated page-reading, so a pasted link works some of the time but not always — when it doesn't, the tool tells you right away and asks you to paste the listing's visible text instead (select all on the page, copy, paste in), which always works since it's the same extraction step either way. Nothing is ever guessed — if a field isn't clearly in the text, it's left blank for you to fill in.

What does "🤖 Summarize a Conversation" do?

A Pro-plan feature on the Discovery Call tab. Paste or type a summary of your call with the listing agent or seller — rough notes, a transcript, or just a quick paragraph — and it pulls out whatever it can into the matching Discovery Call script fields: representation, motivation, condition, major issues (HVAC/electrical/roof/foundation/plumbing), upgrades, special features, the agent's stated ARV, competition, list price, agent-stated floor, offer terms, review timeline, and more. Everything lands in an editable review step first, so you can fix anything before it's applied.

It's built to be safe to run more than once on the same deal: text fields (like Motivation or Condition) get the new summary appended with a dated marker rather than overwriting what's already there, short fields (like list price or the agent's ARV) only fill in if they're currently blank, and the major-issue checkboxes are only ever checked by this — never unchecked — so a second call's summary can't accidentally erase an issue you already confirmed.

This is part of the Pro / Team plan ($197/mo) — trying it on another plan shows a message pointing you to upgrade on Settings.

What's the difference between the Wholesale, Flip, JV, and BRRRR exit strategies?
  • Wholesale — the default: get it under contract, assign it to a cash buyer for a fee.
  • Flip it yourself — you buy and renovate using hard-money-style financing, then sell at ARV; shows both an all-cash ROI and a financed ROI.
  • Financing partner (JV) — a partner funds the deal and you split the profit by a percentage you set.
  • BRRRR — buy, rehab, rent, and refinance instead of selling; the tool works backward from a target refinance to find the highest price that still lets the refinance pay you back.

Switching the dropdown changes the three headline numbers, the breakdown table, and even the buyer/partner email — or check "Lock Max Offer to the standard wholesale formula" to compare strategies side by side without the headline number moving.

How do I save a deal, and where does it go?

Click "👥 Save Deal & Link Contact" in the toolbar — this is the button that writes the deal to your account. Once saved, it shows up in Deal Feed and Deals & Contacts automatically, and you can reopen it any time from the "☁️ Load a previously saved deal" dropdown at the top of the page. Just typing into the fields doesn't save anything by itself — you have to click Save.

If the "Listing agent / broker" fields at the top are filled in, saving also automatically saves that agent as a linked contact — no separate click needed. It won't create a duplicate: if a contact with the same name and phone number is already on file, your deal just links to that existing contact instead of creating a new one (a matching name with a different phone is treated as a different person, so it still gets its own contact rather than merging two different agents).

There's also a separate "💾 Save Property" button that downloads a local .json file of the whole worksheet — useful as a personal backup, separate from the cloud save above.

How do I call or text the listing agent, and what does the pre-filled text say?

Once you've entered the agent's phone number, the 📞 Call and 💬 Text buttons light up. Call opens your device's normal phone dialer via a tel: link. Text opens a pre-filled message: "Hi, this is [you]. I'm contacting you about the property at [address] to see if we can talk about it soon," plus a Zillow link to the property — review it and hit send, nothing goes out automatically.

Clicking 📞 Call, 💬 Text, or ✉️ Email on a linked contact (from the contact edit modal, or the icons next to a contact's name) now automatically drops a note on that contact — "Called," "Texted," or "Emailed," dated — so you get a real activity history with zero extra effort. It doesn't require you to actually finish the call/text; it logs the moment you click the button, same as before it would just open the action.

How do I manage contacts linked to this deal without leaving the page?

After saving a deal, the CRM panel appears below the toolbar. From there you can link an existing contact, quick-add a brand-new one, and click the ✏️ button on any linked contact to open a full editor — name, role, phone, email, brokerage/company, notes, and even every other deal that contact is linked to — right on the Wholesale page (same editor on the Underwriter's Deals & Contacts tab). That same modal has a "📇 Save as .vcf" button to download the contact straight into your phone's Contacts app, with the name correctly split into First/Last (not dumped entirely into Last Name) and the brokerage saved as the contact's company/organization.

"Paste a Listing" on Wholesale also tries to pull the listing agent's brokerage automatically from the pasted text/URL, alongside their name/phone/email — review it before applying, same as every other AI-extracted field.

How do I export or share a deal?
  • 📊 Export Excel / 📄 Export CSV — downloads the full worksheet as a spreadsheet, including a Listing Agent / Broker section (name, phone, email, brokerage).
  • 🖨️ Export / Print PDF — a clean one-page summary via your browser's print dialog.
  • ☁️ Save to Airtable / 📊 Save to Google Sheet — pushes the deal straight to your own connected base/sheet (set these up once on the Settings page).
What's the bar that pins to the top when I scroll?

Once you scroll past the toolbar, a slim bar sticks to the top of the screen showing the property address and (if one's linked) the listing agent's name — so it's always clear which deal's worksheet you're looking at, especially handy if you're working several properties in the same session. Click it any time to jump straight back to the top of the page — no more scrolling all the way up by hand.

When you switch or edit the listing agent on a deal that's already saved (via the agent picker, or by typing a new name/phone/email into those fields), that change is saved to the deal automatically — no need to click "Save Deal & Link Contact" again. A small green ✓ Saved flashes in this same top bar for a couple seconds to confirm it went through, even if you've scrolled well past the toolbar's own "Saved to this deal" message.

📐 Underwriter

Nine calculators for everything besides a straight wholesale flip.
What's the difference between Wholesale and Underwriter?

Wholesale is purpose-built for one workflow: call an agent, get an offer, assign the contract. Underwriter is the deeper "run the real numbers" tool for every other strategy — ground-up construction, land subdivision, buying an existing rental portfolio, or just a standalone loan calculator. Switch between them any time from the nav bar; a shared "Deals & Contacts" CRM tab sits inside Underwriter and tracks deals from both tools.

Which of the nine strategy modes should I use?
  • New Build — Multifamily (4–12 plex): ground-up apartment construction. Checks whether your lot can legally support the unit count you're planning, then shows equity created from the stabilized value.
  • Flip / Renovation: buy distressed, renovate, resell — comps-based ARV, the 70% rule, and hard-money financing math.
  • New Build — Single Family Home: spec-build a house to sell. Figures out the biggest house your lot can legally support (setbacks, coverage, height) and whether your target size fits.
  • Land Subdivision / Lot Split: split raw acreage into lots and compare several lot-size strategies side by side — the tool automatically estimates development costs (roads, utilities, permits) from lot size, and highlights the best-profit scenario.
  • Self-Storage Development: ground-up storage facility — site capacity, rental income, and a button to check population within a 1–5 mile radius (storage demand is very local).
  • Multifamily / Portfolio Acquisition: buying existing rental property — one building or a mixed batch of several — with real mortgage financing and DSCR (whether the income covers the mortgage by a lender's usual minimum margin).
  • Multifamily Napkin Analysis (MAO): a faster, single-property version of Portfolio Acquisition for a quick first pass on an existing apartment deal — value-add rent bump, stabilized value, a Max Allowable Offer that runs three independent tests (cost basis, DSCR, and target cash-on-cash) and takes the lowest, DSCR/LTV loan sizing, and a simplified multi-year hold + exit sale.
  • Slow Flip (Seller-Financed Note Arbitrage): buy a property on one note, resell it to a retail buyer on a better seller-financed note — the down-payment spread, the monthly payment spread while both notes run, and the full payment as pure profit once your own note is paid off.
  • Loan Amortization: a standalone loan calculator — payment schedule, interest-only periods, balloon payments, extra-payment payoff. Works completely on its own with nothing loaded, or you can pull the loan terms in from a saved Flip, SFH, or Portfolio deal (or a Wholesale deal with a Flip exit) and save the computed schedule back onto that same deal — see the next FAQ for details.
Can I model splitting one lot into multiple houses on the SFH Ground-Up Build tab?

Yes — set "Houses to build (lot split)" above the land price field to however many houses you'd carve out of the parcel (e.g. 2 for a 2.5-acre lot split into two buildable lots). The "Actual land price" field is always the whole parcel's purchase price, not per-lot, and it doesn't get divided up — you're buying it once either way. Everything else on the tab (target build size, build cost/sf, comps-based resale) is assumed to be the same house repeated on each lot, so build cost and resale price both scale by the number of houses.

Once you set it above 1, the results panel adds a per-house breakdown (resale price per house, build cost per house, profit per house) alongside the total-project numbers, and a summary line spells out the math (e.g. "$X profit per house × 2 houses, $Y land split across all 2 lots"). Leave it at 1 for a single house on a single lot — every number is identical to how this tab always worked. Note this is a simple model: it doesn't let you plan a different house size/spec per lot, just the same build repeated N times — useful for a quick feasibility check, not a substitute for pricing out each house individually if the lots end up different sizes.

Can I use "Paste a Listing" on the Underwriter tabs too, not just Wholesale?

Yes — every Underwriter strategy tab except Land Subdivision, Portfolio Acquisition, and Loan Amortization has its own "🤖 Paste a Listing" button near the top of the tab. It works the same way as Wholesale's version: paste a listing URL (Zillow, Redfin, Crexi, LoopNet) or the listing's copied text, and it extracts whatever fields apply to that tab — address, price, sqft, lot size, beds/baths for residential tabs, and cap rate, NOI, unit count, average rent per unit, and occupancy for income-property tabs (Multifamily, Self-Storage, Napkin Analysis) — then shows an editable review step before anything gets applied to your real inputs.

The three tabs it's not on don't fit a single-listing paste the same way: Land Subdivision is built around several custom lot-size scenarios rather than one property, Portfolio Acquisition is a list of multiple properties at once, and Loan Amortization is a standalone loan schedule with no listing to paste in the first place. If you open the modal on one of those three, it tells you why instead of showing a broken form.

Can the Amort tab load loan terms from a deal I already saved, and save the schedule back to it?

Yes. Click "📂 Load a Saved Deal" at the top of the Loan Amortization tab and pick from any saved deal that has a clean, single-loan figure to work with: a Wholesale deal whose active exit strategy is Flip (its hard-money purchase loan), an Underwriter Flip / Renovation deal (same HML loan), an Underwriter SFH Ground-Up Build deal (its construction loan, modeled as a 12-month interest-only term since there's no separate build-duration field to pull from), or an Underwriter Portfolio Acquisition deal (its actual bank mortgage — principal, rate, and amortization years). Picking one fills in loan amount, rate, term, interest-only period, and balloon month automatically, and shows a "Linked to [address]" banner so you always know what you're looking at.

Multifamily, Self-Storage, Napkin Analysis, Land Subdivision, and Slow Flip deals don't show up in this picker — their loan data is either more approximate, only partially captured, or (for Land and Slow Flip) doesn't map to a single clean loan the way the four scoped types do. That's a deliberate scope decision for this first version, not a bug — support for those may come later.

Once a deal is loaded, you can adjust any of the loan fields as usual, and the schedule recalculates live exactly like a standalone calculation. When you're happy with it, click "💾 Save Amortization to This Deal" to write the computed schedule (payment, total interest, balloon balance, payoff month, etc.) back into that same saved deal — this updates the existing record in place rather than creating a new one, which is currently the only place in Back40 that can update a saved deal after the fact. Everything else already stored on that deal (its mode, its own inputs/output, pipeline value) is left untouched — only the amortization schedule is added or replaced. Click "🆕 Unlink" any time to detach and go back to a plain standalone calculation — your current field values stay put, they just stop being tied to that saved deal.

Can I pull an address from a saved Deal Feed property into other Underwriter tabs?

Yes. Multifamily, SFH Ground-Up Build, Self-Storage, Napkin Analysis, and Slow Flip each have a "📂 Load from Deal Feed" button right under the Property Address field. Click it, pick any property you've saved on Deal Feed or from the Wholesale calculator, and it drops that address straight into the tab's address field — nothing else on the tab changes. A small banner confirms which property it came from.

This is deliberately lighter than the Flip tab's own "Load from Deal Feed" button (see the next FAQ), which pulls a full financial worksheet — this one just saves you retyping an address you already have on file. It's also scoped a bit wider: since address is the one field every property type shares, it can pull from any Deal Feed or Wholesale-sourced property, including bare manually-logged leads that don't have a full worksheet behind them. Deals saved directly from the Underwriter itself don't show up here — same as on Deal Feed's own page. Land Subdivision and Portfolio Acquisition don't have this button since they don't have a single "the address" field to fill; Loan Amortization has its own separate, more specific "Load a Saved Deal" picker (see above) for pulling in loan terms.

How is Multifamily Napkin Analysis different from Multifamily / Portfolio Acquisition?

Portfolio Acquisition is built for comparing several properties side by side with a blended cap rate and combined DSCR. Napkin Analysis is a faster single-property pass modeled on a classic "napkin math" apartment worksheet: enter current rent, market rent, and a renovation budget, and it works out your value-add income bump and stabilized value at your cap rate.

The headline number — your Max Allowable Offer — is now the lowest of three independent tests, run off current-year NOI, the same way a lender or experienced buyer stress-tests a price from more than one angle:

  • Cost Basis test: the most you can pay and still hit your target total cost basis (price + renovations) as a % of stabilized value.
  • DSCR test: the price at which a DSCR-sized loan (current NOI ÷ your minimum DSCR) exactly equals your Max LTV — above this price your loan gets capped by cash flow, not just LTV.
  • Target ROI test: the highest price at which your cash-on-cash return still meets the target % you set, solved backward since the loan itself depends on price.

The results panel shows all three numbers plus which one is "binding" (i.e. the lowest, and therefore the real ceiling on price). Every other line on the tab — loan amount, down payment, cash invested, debt service, actual DSCR and cash-on-cash — is then calculated off that final MAO number, so the whole worksheet stays internally consistent. If you'd rather set your own price, just edit the Asking Price field — the three MAO tests keep running underneath it for reference.

Right below the MAO headline, a separate "Ideal Purchase Price — Cap Rate Method" callout shows the plain cap-rate valuation on its own: Current NOI ÷ your Valuation Cap Rate, with no cost-basis, DSCR, or target-ROI limits factored in — plus the exact dollar amount and percent the asking price is over or under that number. It's the same simple math a broker's flyer or a quick back-of-envelope cap-rate check would give you, called out separately from MAO since MAO is almost always a stricter (lower) number. Tap the "How is this different from MAO above?" note under it for a one-line reminder of which one to actually use as your real ceiling.

What is the Slow Flip calculator modeling?

A "slow flip" isn't a renovation flip — it's note arbitrage. You buy a property on one note (from a private lender or the seller), then immediately resell it to a retail buyer on a second, separate seller-financed note at better terms. You profit three ways: the spread between the two down payments, the spread between the two monthly payments while both notes are active, and — once your own note is paid off but the buyer's note continues — the buyer's entire payment as pure profit. Use the toggle to either set your rate and solve for the buyer's payment, or set a clean target payment (e.g. "$1,000/mo") and solve backward for the implied rate — both ways of pricing the resale note.

What does the "Site Capacity" / zoning check actually tell me?

Given your lot size and the zoning limits you enter (density, lot coverage %, height/stories, setbacks, parking), it tells you the biggest building your lot can support and flags whether your planned project fits. This is a planning-stage feasibility screen only, not an entitlement — always confirm real zoning rules with the city before tying up land.

How does the Flip tab connect to Deal Feed and Wholesale?

Three buttons at the top of Flip mode work as a pipeline:

  • 📂 Load from Deal Feed — pulls in a deal you previously saved from the Wholesale calculator (address, price, ARV, rehab budget, holding costs) so you don't retype anything.
  • 📤 Export Buyer Packet — a clean, buyer-facing one-page PDF (leaves out your own hard-money financing terms, since that's not the buyer's business).
  • ✉️ Email Buyer Packet — builds the same packet as a real PDF and hands it to your phone's native share sheet (or downloads it with a pre-filled email draft on browsers that don't support that).

Note: only Wholesale-sourced deals populate the "Load from Deal Feed" picker on this tab, and it pulls the full worksheet (price, ARV, rehab, hold months). If you just want an address from Deal Feed or Wholesale without the rest of the numbers, several other Underwriter tabs have a lighter address-only version of this button — see the FAQ on that above.

How do I save and re-open an underwrite?

Type a deal name (or let it auto-fill from the address) in the "Save & Share This Underwrite" section and click "+ Save This Underwrite." It's mirrored to your account so it's instantly linkable to a CRM contact and reopenable from Deals & Contacts. Clicking a saved deal there shows a read-only summary and, for most modes, an "Open in Underwriter" button that jumps you to the right strategy tab — though the tab's input fields themselves don't repopulate for most modes (only a Wholesale-sourced Flip deal loaded via "Load from Deal Feed" restores its actual inputs).

Will I lose my saved underwrites if I close the tab?

The on-screen "Saved Deals" table on the Underwriter page itself only lives in that browser tab and clears on refresh — but every deal you save is also mirrored to your account in the background, so it's safe and reopenable from Deals & Contacts even after a refresh. For a permanent local copy, export to Excel or CSV before you're done.

How do DSCR and cap rate factor into Portfolio Acquisition mode?

Cap rate is used to estimate value (NOI ÷ cap rate). DSCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio) measures whether a property's income covers its mortgage payment by the margin most lenders require — shown red if under 1.20x, green at or above. Both are shown per-property and rolled up across your whole portfolio.

How do I export all my saved deals at once?

Use "⬇ Download Excel (.xlsx)" for a workbook with a separate tab per deal type, or "⬇ Download CSV" for one flat file you can import into Google Sheets. There's also an Airtable integration that pushes every saved deal into your own Airtable base as records — connect your token/base/table once on the Settings page, then just click "⬆ Upload Saved Deals to Airtable" here.

👥 Deals & Contacts (CRM)

Every seller, agent, lender, buyer, and contractor you talk to, and every deal they're tied to.
What is the CRM tab, and how is it different from Deal Feed?

Deals & Contacts (inside the Underwriter page — click the "Deals & Contacts" nav button) is organized around people: contacts and every deal each one is linked to. Deal Feed is organized around deals: a table of every property lead. They share the same underlying data — linking a contact to a deal in one place shows it in both.

How do I add and manage a contact?

Click "+ Add Contact" to create one, or click any existing contact to open their detail card — name, role (Seller/Agent-Broker/Lender/Buyer-Investor/Contractor-GC/Other), pipeline status, phone (with a one-click call button), email (with call and "Compose in Gmail" buttons), brokerage/company, a free-text conversation log, and follow-up reminders. Clicking Call, Email, or Compose in Gmail automatically drops a dated "Called"/"Emailed" note into that log — no need to remember to log it yourself.

How do I link a contact to multiple deals?

Inside a contact's detail card, the "Linked Properties/Deals" section lets you attach any number of saved deals to them — from Wholesale, Underwriter, or Deal Feed — and each linked deal tracks its own pipeline stage independently, so closing one deal for that contact doesn't affect any others they're linked to.

How do follow-ups work here vs. on Deal Feed?

Here, a follow-up is tied to a contact (title + optional due date); on Deal Feed, a follow-up is tied to a deal (with date, time, and a one-click "Add to Google Calendar" link). They're two separate lists right now — a follow-up you set on a deal in Deal Feed won't show up on that contact's card here, and vice versa.

What is "Pipeline Value," and how is it calculated?

It's the sum of every saved deal's profit potential (wholesale fee, flip profit, etc. — not asking price) for deals linked to a contact who isn't in a "Closed" or "Dead" stage. It's a running total of what's still realistically in motion, shown at the top of the Deals & Contacts tab.

How do I delete a contact?

Open the contact and click "Delete Contact" twice within about 4 seconds (a deliberate double-click confirms the deletion instead of a browser popup, so it works reliably as an installed app too). This removes the contact and its deal-links, but does not delete the deals themselves.

📋 Deal Feed

Every lead you're working, from every source, in one table.
What is Deal Feed for, and does it pull leads automatically?

Deal Feed is a manual log — there's no compliant way to auto-scrape leads from Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, or MLS, so every deal here is either typed in by you (or your VA) or fed in automatically from something you save in Wholesale or Underwriter. It's the single place to see everything in your pipeline at once: total deals, how many are still active, how many came in this week, and total profit potential.

How do I log a new deal?

Click "+ Add Deal" and fill in the source (Facebook, Instagram, MLS, LoopNet/Crexi, Referral, Wholesaler/Bird Dog, Off Market, Direct Mail, Driving for Dollars, or Cold Call), property name, market, ZIP code, deal type, price, and notes. You can also add a contact (name/role/phone) in the same form — it'll be created and linked automatically, no separate step. If you've connected Airtable/Google Sheets, checkboxes let you sync the new deal there in the same save.

ZIP code is a newer field — it's blank on any deal saved before it existed. It's only used for the search box and route planner below, so there's nothing you need to go back and fix unless you want those older deals to show up in a ZIP search too.

What's the difference between "Price" and "Profit Potential"?

Price is the asking/purchase price — what it would cost to buy. Profit Potential is what the deal could actually make you — a wholesale fee, flip profit, or build profit, pulled from whichever calculator ran the numbers. For deals with no calculator behind them yet, Profit Potential falls back to showing the Price instead (except wholesale-sourced deals, which show $0 rather than ever showing what you'd pay as if it were profit). This same figure, summed across active deals, is the "Pipeline Value" KPI at the top.

How do follow-ups and the "Add to Google Calendar" link work?

Click the Follow-up cell on any deal to open a small window where you can add or edit a title, date, and time. Overdue follow-ups show in red; upcoming ones show their due date. Every open follow-up gets a "📅 Calendar" link that opens Google Calendar pre-filled — one click on Google's own Save button drops it onto whichever Google account your browser is signed into. There's no login or account-linking on Back40's end, and it's one-way (Back40 never reads your calendar back).

What happens when I mark a deal "Contacted"?

The Follow-up window pops open automatically the moment you change a deal's stage to Contacted, so you can set your next touch point right then instead of clicking back into the lead later.

Can I customize which columns show in the table?

Yes — click "⚙ Columns" to toggle Source, Price, Broker, Contacts, Added date, and Notes on or off. Category, Market, and Units are hidden by default (turn them back on any time). Property, Profit Potential, Stage, and Follow-up always stay visible. Whatever you choose is saved to your account, so it's the same on your phone and desktop.

On a phone, the table has more columns than fit the screen at once — swipe the table sideways to see the rest, or use Columns to hide the ones you don't need so more fits without scrolling. The Columns panel itself now always opens fully on-screen no matter where the button lands after the toolbar wraps to a second line on a narrow phone.

How do I sync a deal to Airtable or Google Sheets from here?

Each row has ☁️ (Airtable) and 📊 (Google Sheets) buttons that push that single deal, once you've connected both on the Settings page. You can also check a box to sync automatically every time you save a new deal from "+ Add Deal."

How do I filter the deal list?

Three dropdowns in the toolbar — Source, Stage, and Category — can be combined to narrow the table down, plus a "🔍 Search city or ZIP" box that matches against each deal's Property name, Market, and ZIP fields as you type — so it still finds a match even on an older deal that only ever had an address typed into the Property name field and never had Market/ZIP filled in. All of them only affect what's shown in the table; the KPI strip at the top always reflects your entire pipeline regardless of filters.

Can I plan a driving route to visit several properties?

Yes. Check the box on the left of any deal's row to select it for a route — you can filter by city or ZIP first to narrow things down, and your checkmarks stick even if you change the filter afterward, so you can check a few in one city, search a different city, and check a few more before planning one combined trip. Once 2 or more are checked, a green bar appears above the table showing your count with a "🗺️ Plan Route" button.

Clicking it opens Google Maps with every checked property as a stop, in the order you checked them, and no starting point filled in — Google Maps asks to use your current location as the start, which is the normal case for "I'm heading out to look at houses." This doesn't use a paid routing service and doesn't try to reorder the stops for you; once the route opens, Google Maps' own "Optimize order" option (available inside Maps on most devices when a trip has multiple stops) can reorder them into the most efficient sequence if you want that. A "✕ Clear Selection" button next to Plan Route empties your current picks, and a checkbox in the table's header row selects (or deselects) every currently-filtered row at once.

Google Maps works best with about 10 or fewer stops in a single trip — the bar will let you know if you've gone past that, and splitting into two trips is the fix.

⚙️ Settings & Integrations

Connect your own Airtable base and Google Sheet once — every tool uses it automatically after that.
How do I connect Airtable?
  1. Go to Settings and create a Personal Access Token at airtable.com/create/tokens, scoped to data.records:read and data.records:write for the base you want deals saved to.
  2. Paste that token, your Base ID (looks like appXXXXXXXXXXXXXX), and the exact table name into the Airtable card.
  3. Click "💾 Save Connection."

Once connected, every "Save to Airtable" button across the app (Wholesale, Underwriter, Deal Feed) uses it automatically — nothing to re-enter.

How do I connect Google Sheets?

A one-time, roughly 5-minute setup inside your own Google account (full instructions and a copy-paste script are on the Settings page under "How to set this up"):

  1. Make a Google Sheet with a header row of whatever column names you want.
  2. In that Sheet, go to Extensions → Apps Script, delete the placeholder, and paste in the provided script.
  3. Click Deploy → New deployment, type Web app, "Execute as" Me, "Who has access" Anyone, then Deploy and authorize it.
  4. Copy the Web App URL it gives you, paste it into the field on Settings, and click Save Connection.
Are my Airtable token and Google Sheets URL safe?

Both are stored under your own account (only you can see them) and are called directly from your browser — they never pass through Back40's own servers. Because the Google Sheets deployment has to be set to "Anyone" access to work, treat that URL like a lightweight secret: anyone who has it can add rows to your Sheet, so don't share it publicly.

Do I need to reconnect on every page?

No — connect once on the Settings page and every tool (Wholesale, Underwriter, Deal Feed) automatically uses the same connection. There's no per-page setup.

🛠️ General & Troubleshooting

Is there a quick way to see a satellite/aerial view of a property?

Yes — a "🛰️ Satellite View" button (or, on Deal Feed, a small 🛰️ icon) sits right next to the address on every page that has one: Wholesale's toolbar, every address-bearing Underwriter tab (Multifamily, Flip, SFH, Self-Storage, Napkin Analysis, Slow Flip, each property card on Portfolio Acquisition, and the linked-deal address on Loan Amortization), and each row on Deal Feed. Click it and Google Maps opens in a new tab already zoomed to a satellite/aerial photo of that address — no separate copy-paste-search step.

Land Subdivision and the Loan Amortization tab's own inputs don't have this button since neither has a single "the address" for a specific property (Land is several custom lot scenarios at once; Amort's button reads whatever address is in its optional linked-deal field instead, if one's been loaded).

I clicked a sync/export button and nothing happened — what's wrong?

Most likely Airtable or Google Sheets isn't connected yet — those buttons show a clear "not connected" message rather than failing silently. Head to Settings to connect (or reconnect) and try again. If a sync fails after connecting, the status message usually names the specific problem (bad token, wrong Base ID, missing column, bad webhook URL).

I don't see a feature I expected — where did it go, or is it planned?

This FAQ is kept up to date with exactly what's live in the app, so if something isn't described here, it isn't built yet. Let your Back40 contact know what you're looking for — a lot of what's in the app today started as exactly that kind of request.

Is my data private to my account?

Yes — every deal, contact, and setting is tied to your account and isolated from every other user's data. Nothing is shared across accounts. See the full Privacy Policy for exactly what's collected and how it's used.

Where can I find your Privacy Policy and Terms of Service?

Privacy Policy and Terms of Service — both are also linked from the sign-in/pricing page footer at back40.ruralhaven.co.

How often is this FAQ updated?

Every time a feature is added, changed, or removed anywhere in Back40, this page gets updated in the same pass — so it should never fall far behind what's actually in the app. See the date at the very bottom of this page for the last update.

Last updated 2026-08-13 (Phase 61) · Back40 is not financial, legal, or tax advice — always verify independently.