Built by an investor who needed it.

My name is Roy. I'm a real estate investor based in North Carolina, and I'm a foreign national — which means the conventional mortgage system doesn't have a place for me. No W-2. No US credit history when I started. No bank willing to underwrite a rental property in my name.

What I had was a property that cash-flowed, a DSCR that cleared every lender's published threshold, and no way to know that from the tools available. I spent months talking to lenders who couldn't help me — each one running my numbers through their own calculator, routing me to their own loan officers, and sending me away with a rate I hadn't modeled for.

That experience is why this tool exists.

I had been buying distressed single-family properties in NC, rehabbing them, renting them out, and then trying to refinance to pull capital for the next deal — the BRRRR method, in plain terms. The strategy works. The financing step is where it gets complicated.

On one of my early refinances, I had modeled a DSCR of 1.28. The property cash-flowed well. I had a signed lease. The numbers looked clean. Then the appraisal came in 9% below my model, the lender recalculated DSCR against their actual PITIA formula — which included reserves I hadn't accounted for — and the deal nearly died at the table.

The problem wasn't the property. The problem was that I had been using a calculator that skipped the math lenders actually use. Every publicly available tool I found ran a simplified version: rent divided by principal-and-interest. Real DSCR underwriting uses rent divided by PITIA — principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and association dues. That gap cost me a quarter-point in rate and nearly cost me the deal.

I built a spreadsheet that ran the real math. Then I turned it into this.

Every property in my portfolio has been financed with a DSCR loan. Not because it was the cheapest option — DSCR rates run higher than conventional — but because it was the only option available to someone in my situation. No W-2. No US-based income that a conventional lender would recognize. Just rental properties that pay for themselves.

Over time, I got good at understanding how lenders actually underwrite these deals. Which DSCR thresholds trigger rate adjustments. How FICO bands affect pricing. What lenders mean when they say they'll do short-term rentals and what the actual overlays are. Which lenders will work with foreign nationals and which ones say they will but actually won't.

That knowledge is what's built into the calculator. Not theory — criteria from lenders I have personally worked with or specifically researched.

Every other DSCR calculator I've found was built by a lender. Newfi has one. Visio has one. LendingOne has one. They're all accurate enough — but they all route you to that lender's loan officers. The calculator exists to generate leads for the company that built it.

That's a conflict of interest that nobody names. The tool that's helping you decide whether to apply is owned by the company that profits when you do. It's like getting a pre-approval estimate from the dealership before you've checked your credit union.

DSCRLens runs the same PITIA math — but it checks your scenario against multiple lenders simultaneously and tells you which tier you'd fall into at each one. If your deal qualifies, you get matched with a broker who has access to 25+ DSCR lenders, not just one. If it doesn't qualify, the calculator tells you specifically why and what would need to change.

DSCRLens is not a lender. We don't originate loans, set rates, or make underwriting decisions. We're a pre-qualification tool and a referral service.

If you use the calculator and choose to get matched, we refer your scenario to a licensed broker partner who works with multiple DSCR lenders. That referral is how we operate as a business — so we do have some interest in the outcome. But we're not routing you to a single lender, and we're not paid more if you choose a specific one. The broker shops your deal across their network.

The calculator results are estimates based on published lender criteria. Actual underwriting involves additional factors — state availability, property condition, appraisal value, lender overlays — that no calculator can fully model. Use this tool to understand where you stand. Use a broker to close the deal.