There are a few basic, yet fundamental, real estate modeling skills you must master before anyone will take you seriously as a real estate professional. Building a mortgage amortization schedule is one of them. Virtually every model you create will require this skill – or some variation of what you do when you build an amortization table. […]
This is a topic I’m all too familiar with. You see, I cut my teeth in real estate largely sourcing and negotiating residential and mixed-use land acquisition opportunities. I’ve put land deals together both as a fiduciary and as a principal, both in the United States and abroad. In this deep dive on land acquisition […]
Several years ago, we published a careers in real estate series where we discussed the various job sectors, business fields, and job functions that exist in the real estate industry. Additionally, we broke down compensation in real estate (salary + bonus) by position and level for 2014. Since then, each year we’ve followed up that […]
Over the years, we’ve created a sizable library of Watch Me Build videos covering Excel models for various real estate investment and property types. However, we’ve yet to create a Watch Me Build involving for-sale product. So this weekend, I thought I’d sit down and record myself building a residential land development model. The exercise […]
Over the years, this real estate equity waterfall with annual periods and IRR or Equity Multiple hurdles has been one of the most popular models in our library of real estate Excel models. It’s been downloaded thousands of times and we’ve received dozens of suggestions for how to improve the model. As a result, we […]
Why use COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS functions in real estate? When real estate analysts first start their careers, they’re often required to work with large data sets and to transpose property and portfolio information from one format to another in Excel. At first, being unfamiliar with many of Excel’s functions, they manually perform these operations. […]
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 […]