# FAQ: Real Estate Search

As an investor it is your primary goal to invest your money as profitable and secure as possible. A crucial factor in this undertaking is the return you obtain from your property investment. Therefore, searching for real estate investments using the return itself as search criterion means performing your search
using the most important search parameter. The return reveals on the one hand the financial profit you will gain and on the other hand it provides also information about the risk involved in the investment. Usually, a higher return is correlated to a higher risk.

The return of a property investment can be calculated using several documents. Please feel free to consult our articles concerning the return for further details. If you want to perform the calculation on your own, you have to obtain the documents from the agent or owner and then decide if the investment fits your needs based on the data you receive. With Investby.Immo this information is immediately available! Even the calculation of the return is already done for you so that you can see directly, if an investment object fulfills your basic requirements.

Your advantages are therefore obvious: you save so much time during your search for a fitting property investment and you obtain a clear and structured overview over the current property investment offers on the real estate market.

With Investby.Immo you can use the net return or net yield as a search parameter. We calculate the net return based on the data we receive from the property offerors. In order for you to comprehend the calculation we made, you can check out the detailed formula in our article [Net Return](/Return/Net_Return).

It is optional on our website for real estate offerors to make the input data used for the calculation public. In every case, you can contact the offeror and ask for the documents which contain the data necessary for the calculation of the return. You will need:

• the annual income statement to learn the non-transferable operating costs,
• the rental agreement (or rather a rent index if the property is not let), to find out the basic rent.

Now you can calculate the net return as follows: $$\text{Net Return} = \frac{\text{Profit per Year}\cdot 100\%}{\text{Buy Price}}.$$

Using $$\text{Profit per Year} = \text{Basic Rent per Year} - \text{non-transferable Operating Costs per Year}$$

results in the final formula: $$\text{Net Return} = \frac{(\text{Basic Rent per Year} - \text{non-transferable Operating Costs per Year}) \cdot 100\%} {\text{Buy Price}}.$$

Or you can simply use our Net Return Online Calculator, to calculate the net return. This calculator is based of course on the above formulas and it allows you to take the maintenance fee as well into account. This plays a role in home owners' associations and enables you to consider the net return from a cash flow point of view.