Five Costs, One Answer: Inside UnitIQ's Calculator

Ask a realtor what a property will actually cash flow, and most of them reach for a napkin. UnitIQ needed the answer to fit on a phone screen instead, and that fell to Hooman Studio to design.

Cash flow sounds like a single number, but it isn't one. It's rental income minus a mortgage payment, minus strata fees, minus a slice of ongoing maintenance, minus what closing costs took out of the deal before it even started. Every one of those inputs comes from a different source and updates on a different schedule. Most tools solve this by handing the user five separate numbers and calling it transparency. Hooman needed to hand them one number and still be honest about where it came from, in service of the bigger reframe covered in UnitIQ Isn't a Listings Site.

The easy version of this problem is a form. Enter your numbers, get a total, move on. Hooman built something that worked the other direction instead, starting from live listing data and layering the user's assumptions on top of it, not asking them to supply numbers they didn't have yet.

Transparency is the difference between a tool people trust and one they question. That’s why we abandoned the standard 'black box' calculator, which buries data in fine print, in favor of what we call layered math. Rather than rolling mortgage payments, strata fees, and maintenance costs into one opaque total, this model keeps every input visible. Rental income updates with live market data, and users can adjust their own terms on the fly. The final cash flow figure isn't just a blind result; it’s an open equation where every underlying assumption is fully traceable and clear.

A calculator this dense doesn't get to cheat on any device. Hooman built and optimized UnitIQ's property and cash flow views separately for tablet, large desktop displays, and phone, not just scaled down from one master layout.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A realtor pulling up a Toronto property's cash flow breakdown on a large studio display has room to see every layer at once. The same realtor checking that number on an iPhone mid-showing needs the headline figure first, with the layers a tap away. Designing for three screens instead of one meant the layered math model had to hold its shape at every size, without quietly dropping a line item just because the screen got smaller.

A single opaque total is fast to build and fast to distrust. The moment a client asks "wait, where does that number come from," a black box calculator has nothing to offer but "trust us." An investment tool cannot survive on trust us. It survives on show me.

Keeping the layers visible meant the interface had to hold more information without feeling like a spreadsheet again, which was the exact problem Hooman was brought in to solve. The layout resolves this by giving the headline cash flow number the most visual weight, with the underlying inputs sitting one tap away rather than crowding the same screen. The user gets the answer first and the receipts on demand, not the other way around. It's a hierarchy problem Pulsia's health dashboard had to solve for its own dense data, even though the two products couldn't be further apart in subject matter.

Getting the calculation right was table stakes. The harder design problem was making five moving parts feel like one coherent answer instead of five separate facts the user has to add up themselves, and making that hold true whether the screen is the size of a phone or a studio display.

That's the actual work behind "cash flow potential, instantly." Not faster math. Math that stays honest about its own moving parts, on whatever screen it's being asked, while still resolving into something a realtor can say out loud with confidence.

If your product's data needs to feel this trustworthy, let's talk.