Property decisions are some of the biggest financial decisions most people ever make. Signing a commercial lease, buying an investment property, working out what a rent review will actually cost. Yet the tools for checking the numbers are surprisingly bad.
Yeeld is my answer to that: a free suite of property calculators that anyone can use, with no account, no paywall and no catch.
The problem
If you’ve ever tried to work out the real cost of a commercial lease, you’ll know the experience. You search for a calculator and find one of three things:
- A lead-generation form. The “calculator” wants your name, email and phone number before it shows you anything, because its real job is to sell you to a broker or an agent.
- A paywall. The useful tools sit inside expensive professional software built for agencies and valuers, not for the tenant or small investor who actually has to live with the decision.
- A tool built for a different market. Plenty of free calculators exist, but they work in square feet and ignore the local taxes, duties and lease laws that change the answer completely.
So most people fall back on a spreadsheet they half trust, or they take the other side’s numbers on faith. That’s a bad position to be in when the other side is the landlord, the lender or the agent.
The people hit hardest are the ones with the least support: a small business owner signing their first lease, a renter planning their budget, an investor comparing two properties on a Sunday night.
What Yeeld does
Yeeld puts the same maths the professionals use into simple, free tools. There are 23 calculators grouped by what you’re trying to do:
- Commercial leasing: effective rent after incentives, CPI rent reviews, rent per square meter, retail turnover rent, occupancy cost ratios and side-by-side lease comparisons.
- Property investment: yields and valuations, cash flow, borrowing power, debt and finance, portfolio summaries, a quick deal check and a property FIRE planner.
- Tax and buying costs: stamp duty, land tax, depreciation, and exit costs including capital gains tax.
- Renters: a cost-of-renting planner and weekly-to-monthly rent conversion.
- Pay: take-home pay after tax, Medicare levy, student loan repayments and super.
Alongside the calculators, a set of plain-English guides explains the concepts behind them, from how a CPI review works to what changes in tax rules mean for investors.
How it’s built
A few principles shaped every design decision.
Free, with no account. You open a calculator and use it. There’s no sign-up, no email capture and no upsell. The product only works if people trust it, and asking for their details first undermines that trust immediately.
Show the working. Every calculator explains how its result is calculated: the formula, the assumptions and the source of each rate. A number you can’t check is just another opinion.
Current data, not stale defaults. Interest rates, tax rates, CPI figures, stamp duty and land tax rules change regularly. Yeeld keeps those inputs current, drawing on official sources such as the central bank, the tax office, the statistics bureau and state revenue offices, so the answer reflects the rules as they are now.
Private by design. All calculations run in your browser. Your inputs never leave your device unless you choose to contact us, and you can optionally keep them saved locally so you can come back to a scenario later.
Fast and simple. A static, client-side architecture means pages load instantly and the tools work the same on a phone as on a desktop. There’s no server doing the maths, so there’s nothing to wait for.
Who it’s for
- Commercial tenants and small business owners checking what a lease really costs before they sign.
- Property investors comparing deals, stress-testing borrowing and planning for tax.
- Tenant representatives and property professionals who need quick, defensible numbers for clients.
- Renters budgeting for the true cost of where they live.
What I’d tell another builder
- Find the tools people need but can’t get without a sales pitch. Removing the catch is a product in itself.
- Transparency is a feature. Showing the formula and the source builds more trust than any marketing line.
- Keep the data current. In finance and tax, a tool with last year’s rates is worse than no tool at all.
- Put the work in the browser. It makes the product faster, cheaper to run and private by default.