Free short-let investment tools
Three calculators that answer the questions every short-let buyer asks before they offer: what does this actually yield, would a normal tenancy beat it, and how empty can it sit before it loses money. Free, no signup, results in pounds.
These three calculators cover the arithmetic behind a short-let purchase decision. The yield calculator turns a purchase price, nightly rate and occupancy into a net yield and a payback period. The short-let vs long-let calculator runs both strategies on the same property and tells you which one nets more, and by how much. The break-even calculator gives you the occupancy you need just to cover costs — the number that decides whether a market is comfortable or marginal.
All three are free, need no account or email address, and run entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to us or stored. They are pre-filled with realistic UK figures so you can see a worked result immediately and change one number at a time. Every page shows the formula and its assumptions in full, so you can check the maths rather than trust it.
The tools
Each one is a single page: calculator at the top, formula and worked example below it.
Turn a purchase price, a nightly rate and an occupancy figure into gross revenue, net yield and the number of years the property takes to pay for itself.
Put short-letting and a standard tenancy side by side on the same property, after costs, and see which one actually wins — and by how much a year.
Work out the occupancy percentage — and the number of booked nights a month — you need just to cover your costs before you make a penny.
What these tools can't tell you
A calculator is only as good as the nightly rate and occupancy you feed it, and those two numbers are exactly the ones buyers guess wrong. A city-wide average hides enormous street-level spread: two flats a ten-minute walk apart can differ by 20 points of occupancy because one sits inside a licensing zone and the other doesn’t, or because one is on the tourist side of the river.
If you want the real inputs rather than assumptions, our paid reports compute occupancy, achieved nightly rate and regulation risk for a specific address or a polygon you draw on the map, from live short-let data. Read the methodology for how, or browse the free city guides for market-level figures you can drop straight into these calculators.
Where to go next
Free market data to feed the calculators, and the reports that replace the guesswork.
Run a report on your address →