I was selling an apartment in a developing country. I wanted to know, given the constantly updating property sales tax and rapidly worsening exchange rate, how much I’d end up pocketing in USD, if I sold for X vs X - 5% vs X - 10%, etc
That would inform my “I’m willing to go as low as” selling price.
So I built myself an app to scrape the current tax from the government’s online calculator and assemble a dozen what-if scenarios, given the current exchange rate.
When I found one that would let me break even, cash in hand after all fees and taxes, that became my price floor.
I tend to think about these types of problems this way as well. But then there’s folks that will throw this together in Excel, and I realize I would not know where to start. Anyone got pointers?
My data source was a worksheet that was generated by my app.
Worksheet 2 - Scraped tax Data + Excel fetches current exchange rate from its "financial market information"
Worksheet 1 - My "dashboard" with a dozen possible price levels, agent fees, etc and using XLOOKUP to read from Worksheet 2.
The benefit of compiling this into Excel rather than a custom frontend is 1) Excel comes with unparalleled tools for sorting/filtering/visualizing data and 2) I shared this XLS with real estate agents.
They couldn't fathom somebody selling a property for any price other than whatever their market analysis provider says.
Before sharing this XLS with the agent, the conversations were... frustrating.
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"I want to pocket a minimum $x USD after this deal. What should I set my price at in local currency?"
"Currently comparable apartments in your area at selling at Y local currency"
"Okay, but ultimately I'm leaving and after the sale I want to immediately exchange and transfer the money and pocket $x USD after fees and exchange rates"
"It's illegal to sell a flat in USD"
"Yes I know. I'm selling it in local currency. But my end goal is to get $x USD after fees and taxes. What should I set my price at to achieve this?"
"If we try to sell your apartment in USD, the buyers will be angry and won't come"
"I'm not trying to sell my apartment in USD. I'm selling it in local currency. What I'm saying is that after selling, I will convert this local currency to USD, and I want that to be at least $x USD. Can you calculate the fees and taxes, so that you can tell me how much in local currency I should set it for, so that in the end I get $x USD?"
"Currently comparable apartments in your area at selling at Y local currency."
"But after taxes and fees and money exchange how much will that get me in $ USD?"
"It's illegal to sell a flat in USD, so we can't do that."
That would inform my “I’m willing to go as low as” selling price.
So I built myself an app to scrape the current tax from the government’s online calculator and assemble a dozen what-if scenarios, given the current exchange rate.
When I found one that would let me break even, cash in hand after all fees and taxes, that became my price floor.
It worked. Now I don’t need my app anymore.