Today, we’re thrilled to share with the A.CRE community a new timesaving (and free) Excel tool: the ‘Excel 4 CRE’ Add-in! Over the past year, we at A.CRE (together with our new favorite companion, ChatGPT!) have been developing and sharing this Excel add-in. This add-in seeks to save each one of us time by helping […]
That first job in real estate, most likely at the analyst-level, will be one of the most important jobs – if not the most important job – of your real estate career. Now don’t misunderstand me. Failures can be overcome, wrong decisions can be made right, and mid-career pivots can be successfully executed. But landing a […]
As I’ve mentioned in other Watch Me Build posts, one way to become a better real estate financial modeling professional, is to watch other professionals model. Thus, the more exposure you can get to other’s methods, the more adept a real estate professional you will become. This is especially the case with modeling real estate […]
A host of real estate related jobs are available at government and non-profit organizations. Examples of roles in this area might include business development professionals working with local developers and real estate investors to coordinate and encourage public-private partnerships; managers of real estate assets owned by these types of organizations; and real estate professionals working with investment incentive […]
So you want to run Monte Carlo simulations in Excel, but your project isn’t large enough or you don’t do this type of probabilistic analysis enough to warrant buying an expensive add-in. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Excel’s built-in functionality allows for stochastic modeling, including running as many simulations as your computer’s processing power […]
A childhood friend called me this week and asked for a favor. He is the lender on a private real estate loan and was wanting a way to personally service the loan. Namely, he needed a tool to issue monthly invoices, track the principal vs interest paid in each month, and calculate the current loan […]
So a question recently came in around why a commercial real estate investor would use the Yield-on-Cost metric to assess a value-add real estate investment. This question came on the heals of several other questions also related to development spread (i.e. investment spread) and market cap rate. So I thought I’d put a post together […]
In my experience, using the SUMPRODUCT function in Excel to calculate weighted average is one of the most oft-used Excel techniques in real estate financial modeling. I learned this technique on day one of my first real estate internship and I continue to use it at least once a week to this day. So in […]
I’ve fielded a handful of Cash-on-Cash (CoC) return questions of late. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post on what the Cash-on-Cash return metric tells me about a potential real estate investment. This article is a primer, if you will, on when this metric is helpful to use in your analysis […]
Over the years, Michael and I have built and shared numerous real estate equity waterfall models, all multi-tiered and most with internal rate of return (IRR) hurdles. And as our readers have downloaded those models, I’ve received dozens of requests for an equity waterfall model with a simpler partnership structure. This model seeks to be an […]
As many of you recall, in 2015 I set out to build an Excel alternative to the widely-used (and now discontinued) ARGUS DCF. With career moves and a lot of other A.CRE-related side projects, this undertaking has been slow going. Alas, in 2016 I released the first beta-version of the model – my All-in-One (Ai1) […]
We received a question from an A.CRE reader this week that I thought warranted a thorough response. The question was, and I paraphrase, “I am an LP looking for models to help vet syndication deals. Do you have any models that can be used to evaluate a deal from the perspective of an LP, as […]
We recently shared a new modeling test to our library of real estate case studies entitled UK Debt Advisory Firm Modeling Test. In that case study, the test asked the real estate professional to analyze the returns of three different debt options. Two of those debt options include a type of mortgage called a linear […]
At A.CRE, we’ve built dozens of custom GPTs for internal and external purposes. Some of the GPTs have general application, while others are custom GPTs specifically for commercial real estate. And among those custom GPTs specifically for CRE, we’re working to build the world’s largest library of real estate analyst GPTs. A few months ago, […]
In our glossary of commercial real estate terms, we recently answered the question: what is debt yield? As a follow up to that entry, I thought I’d expand on the concept of debt yield by showing you how lenders use debt yield to come up with the appropriate mortgage loan amount. Lenders and Sensitivity to Loan […]