Glossary

Every domain-specific or AI-specific term you'll see in Brickwise, defined in plain language. If you're not sure what something on screen means, it's probably here.

Financial terms

Cap rate (capitalization rate) Net Operating Income divided by purchase price, as a percentage. A quick way to compare deals regardless of financing — the annual return you'd get if you paid cash. Higher generally means cheaper relative to income, but often also means higher risk or a rougher area.

Cash flow What's left over each month (or year) after collecting rent and paying every expense, including the mortgage. Positive cash flow means the property pays for itself and puts money in your pocket; negative means you're subsidizing it out of your own funds.

Cash-on-cash return (CoC) Annual cash flow divided by the actual cash you put in (down payment, closing costs, any rehab). Unlike cap rate, this accounts for financing — it answers "how hard is my actual invested cash working?"

DSCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio) Net Operating Income divided by the annual mortgage payment. A DSCR of 1.5 means the property's income covers the mortgage 1.5 times over. Below 1.0 means the property doesn't generate enough income to cover its own debt payment. Lenders often require a minimum DSCR (commonly 1.20–1.25) to approve a loan. Shows as "N/A (no debt)" for an all-cash purchase, since there's no mortgage payment to compare against.

NOI (Net Operating Income) Rental income minus operating expenses (taxes, insurance, maintenance, vacancy, management) — before the mortgage payment. This is the number lenders and the cap rate calculation both key off.

Vacancy rate The percentage of potential rent you assume will be lost to empty units between tenants. Set as an input, not a guarantee — 5% is a common conservative planning assumption.

Effective gross income Gross potential rent minus the vacancy assumption — what you actually expect to collect.

Cash required Total cash needed to close: down payment plus closing costs (and rehab, for a BRRRR deal).

Deal strategies

BRRRR (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat) A strategy where you buy a property below market value, fix it up, rent it out, then refinance based on the new (higher) appraised value to pull most or all of your original cash back out — so you can repeat the process on the next deal. Brickwise's BRRRR scenario calculator models the refinance step.

ARV (After-Repair Value) What a property is expected to appraise for once renovations are complete — the number a BRRRR refinance is based on, not the purchase price.

Forced equity Value you create through renovation rather than waiting for the market to appreciate — the gap between what you paid (plus rehab cost) and the After-Repair Value.

LTR (Long-Term Rental) The standard rental model: one tenant, typically on a 12-month lease.

MTR (Mid-Term Rental) Furnished rentals for stays of roughly one to twelve months — traveling nurses, corporate relocations, and similar. Priced and modeled differently from both a standard lease and a nightly short-term rental.

STR (Short-Term Rental) Nightly or weekly rentals (Airbnb-style). Brickwise's STR scenario calculator models revenue based on nightly rate and occupancy, month by month.

Investment thesis The strategic reason you're pursuing a deal — why you think it'll work. Brickwise tracks one primary thesis and any number of secondary ones per property: Cash flow, Appreciation, Forced equity, BRRRR, Balanced, Long-term rental, Mid-term rental, Short-term rental. This is a label you set, not something Brickwise infers — it shapes how you and (when you ask) Ezrah evaluate the deal.

Scoring

Investment Score A single 0–100 score summarizing a property's underwriting strength, computed deterministically from real inputs (cap rate, cash-on-cash return, DSCR, and more) — never guessed or estimated by AI. Comes with a recommendation: Strong candidate, Investigate, Negotiate, Watch, or Pass.

Data Confidence Score A separate 0–100 score measuring how trustworthy the data behind the Investment Score is — not how good the deal looks, but how sure Brickwise is about the numbers it's based on. A property can have a high Investment Score built on thin, unverified data; the Data Confidence Score is what tells you that. It drops when facts are unverified, conflicting, or stale (see Fact and Source below).

Recommendation The Investment Score's plain-language verdict: Strong candidate (score is strong across the board), Investigate (promising but needs more digging), Negotiate (numbers work only at a better price), Watch (not there yet, but worth tracking), Pass (doesn't clear the bar). Always derived from the deterministic score — never chosen by an AI model.

Provenance (where a number came from)

Source A record of who or what a piece of information came from — a seller, a listing agent, a public record, a verified document. Every fact Brickwise stores is tied back to one.

Fact A single claimed data point about a property (e.g. "monthly rent: $900") tied to a Source. Facts are how Brickwise tracks where a number came from and how much to trust it, separately from the number itself.

Fact conflict When two facts disagree about the same field (e.g. two different reported rents), Brickwise records a conflict rather than silently picking one — so you know there's a discrepancy to resolve instead of unknowingly underwriting off a wrong number.

Source types — how much scrutiny a claim deserves, roughly most to least verified: VERIFIED, PUBLIC_RECORD, THIRD_PARTY, MLS_LISTING, USER_PROVIDED, AGENT_CLAIM, SELLER_CLAIM, AI_ESTIMATE, CALCULATED, UNKNOWN. Seller and agent claims are treated with more built-in skepticism than public records or verified documents — both by the Data Confidence Score and by the Due Diligence AI reviewer.

Deal pipeline

Deal A property you're actively evaluating or pursuing, tracked through a stage from first look to close (or pass). Distinct from an owned property (see below) — a deal doesn't show up on your Dashboard's property list until it's actually yours.

Deal stage Where a deal sits in your pipeline: New → Screening → Researching → Interested → Due diligence → Offer preparation → Offered → Negotiating → Under contract → Financing → Closed (or Passed / Lost at any point). You move a deal forward manually as your process advances.

Owned property A property you actually own, as opposed to one still working its way through the deal pipeline. Owned properties appear on your Dashboard; in-progress deals live on the Deals page. (Today there's no button that flips a deal into an owned property automatically when it closes — see Limits & Expectations.)

Due diligence finding A specific, cited risk or gap the Due Diligence AI reviewer flagged for a deal, graded by severity (Critical/High/Medium/Low) and grounded only in the Facts and Conflicts actually on file for that property.

Portfolio (Proposed / Scenario) A named group of properties you want to analyze together. Proposed portfolios are typically deals you're considering bundling; Scenario is a looser label for any what-if grouping. Both work identically — aggregate NOI/cash flow/DSCR, concentration analysis, and stress testing across whichever properties you add.

Concentration How spread out (or bunched up) your portfolio is across geography, property type, and investment thesis — measured by share of total invested capital ("basis"), not just property count. High concentration in one city or one thesis means one local event could hit your whole portfolio at once.

Stress testing & offers

Scenario (Base / Upside / Downside / Severe) Four preset variations on your underwriting assumptions, used to see how a deal holds up if things go better or worse than your base-case numbers. Base is your as-entered assumptions; Upside is more optimistic; Downside and Severe apply increasingly harsh rent/expense/vacancy adjustments.

Binding constraint When Brickwise computes a maximum offer price, it checks several independent limits (cap rate, DSCR, cash-on-cash return, and — for BRRRR — an equity buffer) and takes the lowest one, since that's the one actually stopping you from paying more. The "binding constraint" is whichever limit produced that lowest number.

Walk-away price The highest price at which the deal still clears every one of your minimum-return constraints — Brickwise's suggested ceiling for negotiation.

AI features & how to read their answers

Brickwise's AI features (branded as Ezrah) never invent a financial number. Every dollar figure, percentage, or ratio you see from Ezrah is either read from data already on file or computed by one of Brickwise's own deterministic calculators — the same math the forms use. See Limits & Expectations for what this guarantees and what it doesn't.

VERIFIED FACT A claim Ezrah is making because it looked the value up — deal stage, stored due diligence findings, contacts, a previously-computed score. Not a guess.

CALCULATED RESULT A number Ezrah is stating because it ran one of Brickwise's calculators (mortgage, NOI, cap rate, DSCR, BRRRR, STR, or the Investment Score) with the assumptions given. Deterministic — but only as trustworthy as the assumptions behind it.

ESTIMATE Ezrah is offering an approximation because no tool or stored figure covers the question — always labeled explicitly rather than presented as fact.

AI INTERPRETATION Ezrah's own judgment or synthesis — not a fact, not a calculation. Useful context, but it's an opinion, not data.

Agent run A logged record of one AI feature actually executing — which agent, when, real token counts, success or failure. Visible in the Investment Manager panel's "Agent runs" table, so you can see exactly what ran on a deal and when.