Entries by Spencer Burton

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Simple Acquisition Model for Office, Retail, Industrial Properties (Updated Dec 2024)

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 […]

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Using COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS Excel Functions in Real Estate Underwriting (Updated Dec 2024)

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. […]

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Best Practices in Real Estate Financial Modeling (Updated Nov 2024)

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 […]

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Learning Real Estate Financial Modeling in Excel (Updated Oct 2024)

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. […]

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Watch Me Build a Dynamic Mortgage Amortization Table in Excel (Updated September 2024)

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. […]

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Deep Dive – Land Acquisition and Assemblage (Updated September 2024)

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 […]

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Watch Me Build a 3-Tier Real Estate Equity Waterfall Model (Updated Aug 2024)

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 […]