The NY Times Buy or Rent calculator is a great tool (and probably one of the most commonly used).

However, it has certain flaws: for starters, it assumes you know exactly what tax you pay, what mortgage interest rates (and fees) you qualify for, what your property taxes will be, etc, etc.

One of the key features about SmartAsset.com is that we do all that for you, and then let you tweak the numbers if/as you wish.

We also pull in live mortgage data (along with a number of other datasets) to compare various buy-v-rent scenarios that actually apply to you.

This is also only the beginning of the product. Apart from comparing buy/rent, we want to ensure users understand how much they can really afford (and why), how taxes will change over time, how their credit-score affects their ability to borrow money, etc.

Beyond that, there's also managing the process that goes with any major financial decision (what we like to call the "interest, learn, shop, buy" steps.

It would be interesting if you could hook up with a site like redfin or whatnot to embed that on their site so when you are looking at a house it automatically fills in all the data it knows about.

Redfin already has property taxes and mortgage rates, it just doesn't bother to put taxes in the calculator, for unknown reasons. Doesn't have the credit score stuff, but that's not really relevant -- if you have poor credit, buying a house anywhere near your affordability boundary is likely a huge mistake anyway.

@icefox: that is exactly on our roadmap. We want to (a) be able to show users what they can afford in their selected (and neighboring) regions; and (b) to get all the right information for specific properties.

We're coding this right now, and should have it released this summer.

NYT does a good job relative to most calculators but it is still a calculator and consequently limited.

The big differences then are accuracy and ease of use. On accuracy, there is a difference both in how the numbers are calculated (we use our financial modeling back-end) and the quality of the assumptions used - we have local data sets for transaction expenses, real estate taxes, income taxes etc - NYT uses default values, like 28% for your marginal income tax. This means they end up overstating the tax advantage for lower incomes and understating it for higher incomes). We are also much easier to use, precisely because the user is not relied on for all of the important assumptions - we know your tax rates, we know which mortgages are available to you etc.

Hope this is helpful. Happy to answer any other questions.

Love how easy and straight forward it is to use. But I wouldn't have understood these advantages of using smartasset that you outlined above just from landing on your site. Maybe consider outlining this somewhere on your site before I think of it as the same as the NYT calculator and the zillow and the redfin offerings too?

Beautifully done for sure, looking forward to more from you guys!