A few years back, on a sleepy Saturday afternoon while my kids were busy eating Halloween candy, I decided to create a simple real estate acquisition model in Excel for office, retail, and industrial deals. Since then, I’ve made various updates, including error fixes and functional improvements. The model calculates returns at the property and […]
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. […]
At A.CRE, we’re always on the lookout for tools that can streamline our workflow and make our jobs a little easier. As the AI space evolves, OpenAI has rolled out two features that we’ve been putting to work in our day-to-day operations: ChatGPT Projects and Custom GPTs. These two features have unlocked new ways for […]
A question came up recently in the A.CRE Accelerator’s real estate waterfall modeling course regarding how to model GP Catch Up (i.e. Sponsor Catch Up) and LP Clawback provisions. I put together a quick video tutorial in response to that question, and in doing so I realized I had never shared to A.CRE a real […]
Before you use one of our real estate financial models (i.e. Excel templates), or before you set out to build your own real estate analysis tool in Excel, it’s important to keep in mind a few real estate financial modeling best practices. This list combines industry conventions for modeling in Excel, with various suggestions specific […]
At A.CRE, we’re always exploring new ways to make our work more efficient for you and for us! Whether it’s building custom GPTs for real estate, experimenting with locally installed LLMs, or finding AI-specific tools for commercial real estate, we love to tinker. Recently, we hit on something we’ve been wanting for a while: a […]
We’re often asked by our readers how we learned to be proficient in real estate financial modeling. The question usually arises because the person wants to know how to model real estate in Excel to either land a job in commercial real estate (e.g., private equity, development, acquisition, debt) or to analyze their own deals. […]
This past week, we held our monthly ‘technical AMA‘ where I answer technical questions from the audience. These questions usually cover nuanced elements of real estate financial modeling or the application of artificial intelligence in real estate. And during this week’s session, we had a hearty discussion about our A.CRE AI Assistant GPT that our […]
This week, I’ll be hosting my monthly A.CRE Ask Me Anything (AMA) where we dive into various technical topics, and AI in CRE often comes up. Last month, someone asked me to show the group how to install a Large Language Model (LLM) on their computer—essentially a personal ChatGPT that runs locally. So, I figured it […]
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 […]
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 […]