ARV Calculator: Comps, Adjustments and Lender Loan-to-ARV Caps

The worksheet: five comps, five adjustments, one range

An ARV is not a single lookup. It is a range built from sold comparables, each adjusted for what makes it different from your finished house. The layout below is what you fill in. The inputs are yours; the adjustment rates must come from your market (see the Fannie Mae section below), so we show our placeholders only to demonstrate the arithmetic.

Worksheet layout: one column per comp, one row per adjustment

Add lines for lot size, garage, basement and anything else that moves price in your market. Keep each comp to the same row structure so the adjustments can be compared. The sign rule is simply that you adjust the comp toward your subject: a smaller comp is adjusted up, a larger one down.

Worked example: a $215,000 flip with five comps (our arithmetic)

The subject is a house we chose: 1,400 square feet above grade, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths after rehab, bought for $215,000 with a $45,000 rehab budget (the same deal as in our fix and flip calculator). The five comps and the adjustment rates are invented for the example. The rates are placeholders: $85 per square foot, $5,000 per bedroom, $4,000 per bath, $40,000 between a dated and a renovated house, and 0.3% of sale price per month for time. They are not market data.

The five comps (example data)

Adjustments and adjusted prices (our arithmetic)

For comp A: time is $325,000 x 0.3% x 2 months = $1,950; area is (1,400 - 1,350) x $85 = $4,250; net is $6,200; the adjusted price is $325,000 + $6,200 = $331,200. The range of adjusted prices is $316,708 to $345,248, the median is $331,200 and the mean is $332,039. Comp E needs a $40,000 condition adjustment, which is 15.2% of its price in gross terms; the others are 6.7% or less. If you set E aside as a weak comp (our screen, not a rule of any lender), the middle of the four remaining is $335,258, the average of $331,200 and $339,315. Which of those is your ARV is a judgment: the median of all five is the lowest of the central numbers, and a lender's appraiser who distrusts the renovated comps will start near the low end.

One trap in the worksheet: the condition line is a market adjustment, what buyers pay more for a renovated house, not your rehab cost. In the example it is $40,000 against a $45,000 budget; if you used the budget itself, you would be assuming that every renovation dollar returns a dollar of price.

What Fannie Mae says about comps and adjustments

Fannie Mae's Selling Guide is not a hard money rulebook: it governs loans sold to Fannie Mae, and a bridge lender is not bound by it. It is the public text on how an appraiser should select and adjust comparable sales, so it is the best reference for what a defensible adjustment looks like. We read two sections on October 27, 2026, both carrying the version date June 4, 2025.

Fannie Mae Selling Guide sections B4-1.3-08 and B4-1.3-09 (version dated June 4, 2025)

The practical reading: a high gross adjustment is a reason to look harder, not a violation, and the reverse is also true. A comp with a 3% gross adjustment built on a made-up rate is worse than a 15% one built on a paired sale. The page's own example, a $20 against $100 per square foot error, is the mistake the worksheet makes easy if you copy a rate from an article.

Where the lender's ARV comes from

Your worksheet sets your ARV. The lender sets its own, and the loan is sized on that. Kiavi's page says its “proven ARV model” helps you “quickly estimate financing for your next fix-and-flip project”, and its list of terms includes “No Appraisal”; the page does not say how the ARV used for the final sizing is set. Lima One's FixNFlip page states a 75% LTV and does not define the value. RCN Capital's page names ARV and states a minimum ARV by property type ($100,000 for a single-family home) without describing how it is determined. LendingOne publishes an ARV calculator that applies the 70% rule. So the dependable approach is to bring a comp set to the lender, ask which value they will use and whether an appraisal or desk review is part of the process, and size your deal on the lower of your range and theirs.

What each lender caps: the published loan-to-ARV limits

We read the fix-and-flip pages of Kiavi, Lima One Capital, RCN Capital and LendingOne on October 27, 2026 (the earlier readings behind our hard money loan calculator and best fix-and-flip lender pages are unchanged on these limits). They are advertised maximums, not quotes.

Published leverage on fix-and-flip pages, read October 27, 2026

RCN Capital's page also carries a grid by experience and rehab size, and it is the clearest public picture of how much the cap moves with the borrower and the job.

RCN Capital maximum loan-to-ARV by experience and rehab size, page read October 27, 2026

Each row also finances 100% of rehab costs. The 100% of purchase price figure carries a footnote on the page: five or more in-state flips, ten or more in total, a 720+ FICO score and a loan of $800,000 or less ($1,000,000 in California). The page's headline tier for up to 2 flips (70% of ARV) and its grid for 1 to 4 flips (75%, 72.5% or 65%) do not match; read your own term sheet.

What your ARV does to the loan and the 70% rule (our arithmetic)

Take the example loan from our calculator: 90% of the $215,000 purchase price plus 100% of the $45,000 rehab, which is $238,500. A lender funds the lesser of that and its cap times the ARV it accepts. The table shows the loan at four ARVs. Where a cap binds, the loan is lower than $238,500 and you bring the difference in cash.

Loan at each cap for four ARVs, example deal (the loan is the lesser of $238,500 and the cap)

Three readings. First, which cap binds depends on you as much as on the house: at the median ARV the same $215,000 deal is fully funded under an 80% or 75% cap, $6,660 short under the 70% tier ($238,500 less $231,840) and $39,780 short under the heavy-rehab 60% tier. Second, the cushion is small: a 75% cap binds once the lender's ARV is below $318,000, which is 4.0% under our median. Third, a cap that binds costs cash, not just profit: if the lender's ARV is 5% under the median, a 75% lender funds $2,520 less than the full amount (our arithmetic).

The 70% rule max offer at the same ARVs (our arithmetic)

On every ARV in the range the 70% rule says the $215,000 contract is too high. That is a filter, not a verdict: it ignores the loan, your hold time and your costs, which is why our fix and flip calculator tests the deal against your actual financing. For the $7,000 per $10,000 sensitivity, the lesson is the same as for the loan: the ARV you choose decides the answer, so choose it from the worksheet, not from the listing price you hope for.

What federal data can and cannot say about ARV

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act file has no ARV field, so no public dataset says what value lenders used on flips. What it does report is a loan-to-value ratio, which Regulation C defines in 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(24) as “the ratio of the total amount of debt secured by the property to the value of the property relied on in making the credit decision”. On a rehab loan that value could be the purchase price, an as-is value or an after-repair value, and the field does not say which.

With that limit, here is the record. In 2025, 47,900 originated conventional, first-lien, closed-end, business-purpose loans on 1-4 unit investment properties to buy a home, with a term of 24 months or less and no reported debt-to-income ratio (our proxy for short-term flip and bridge loans, as on our rates page), totaled $20,782,980,000 with a median loan of $265,000. Of them, 42,448 report a loan-to-value ratio: the median is 70.62%, the middle half runs from 65.25% to 74.98%, and the median is 70.13% at non-bank lenders and 75% at banks and credit unions (our arithmetic). Dividing loan amount by property value on the 45,707 loans that report both gives 70.732%.

Short-term investor purchase loans in HMDA, 2025: reported loan-to-value

Three quarters of these loans report a ratio at or under about 75%, which sits at or below most of the advertised caps above. Read that as consistent with them, not as proof that borrowers were at the cap: a ratio measured against a purchase price says little about leverage against the finished value, and a loan in the data can be well under its lender's cap.

What a reader can do with this

• Build the five-comp worksheet before you make an offer, using closed sales from the last 12 months and market-derived rates for each adjustment. Keep the range, not only the median.
• Re-run the loan table with your lender's cap and an ARV 5% under your median. If the cap binds there, you need the extra cash or a lower price.
• Use the RCN Capital grid as a reminder that the cap depends on you: a new investor on a heavy rehab can see 60% of ARV where an experienced one sees 75%. Ask each lender which row you are in.
• Ask the lender in writing which value it will use (its own model, an appraisal or a desk review) and whether you can supply comps.
• Run the full profit math, with points and holding costs, in the fix and flip calculator, and use the hard money loan calculator to size the loan from the lesser-of rule. For the strategy where you rent and refinance instead of selling, see the BRRRR method; for how flipping has done lately, see house flipping in 2026 and our fix and flip loans guide.

When your ARV and your numbers hold up, these lenders make fix-and-flip loans; ask each for the value it will use, its cap for your experience level, points and draw fees in writing. Our Kiavi review and Kiavi vs Lima One comparison cover two of them in detail.

FAQ

Sources: Kiavi fix-and-flip page (kiavi.com/loans/fix-and-flip), Lima One Capital FixNFlip page (limaone.com/fix-and-flip-loans), RCN Capital fix and flip page (rcncapital.com/fix-and-flip) and LendingOne fix and flip page (lendingone.com/fix-and-flip-loans), all read October 27, 2026; Fannie Mae Selling Guide B4-1.3-08, Comparable Sales, and B4-1.3-09, Adjustments to Comparable Sales, both dated June 4, 2025, read October 27, 2026; 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(24) (Regulation C); FFIEC HMDA loan-level data for 2025, counted by the script hmda_ffl_cut.py. The five comps, the adjustment rates, the $238,500 loan, the 70% rule results and every ARV, loan and cap figure in the worked example are our arithmetic on example inputs. Compiled October 27, 2026. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.