We’re in a moment where the advantage from being AI native is disproportionately high and the effort to achieve it is surprisingly low. In fact, in most rooms of 10 professionals, the one who’s spent even a few weeks tinkering with AI tools stands out. This post lays out a 30-day roadmap to becoming that […]
In our business, initial assessments are most often made from a distance. We rely on Google Maps satellite images, broker packages, demographic reports, street view, and more to evaluate a multi-million-dollar property. And these assessments generally come before we ever step foot on site. Which is why that the in-person site visit is so crucial. […]
We’re kicking off a new A.CRE series called Quick AI Wins: bite-sized, high-impact AI tools and use cases that owners, investors, brokers, and managers can use to create leverage in CRE. While many of these tools are in the early stages (this one is in private beta as of the writing of this post), these […]
We’ve received numerous requests over the years for a Self Storage Development Model in Excel. With strong investment and development activity in this niche property type, I recognize a self storage model on A.CRE is long overdue. But with so many other projects on our plates and limited experience with self storage, we just hadn’t […]
Over the years, we’ve shared eight development-focused real estate financial models and numerous development-specific tools to the A.CRE Library of Excel Models. Nevertheless, there’s been a hole in the development offerings in our library. The library has been missing a model to analyze general land development scenarios, such as master-planned residential and commercial developer opportunities […]
Build-to-rent (BTR) has become more and more common in CRE and now accounts for a meaningful share of development. In the past, we’ve recommended A.CRE readers use our Apartment Development Model for BTR analysis. However, as we’ve received numerous requests over the few years for a purpose-built BTR model – including an inquiry in a […]
We recently received an email from an A.CRE reader using one of our real estate financial models with a curious question. He explained that many of the cells in his model suddenly had a strikethrough applied to the text. Naturally, he wondered if a macro had altered a setting in the model or if something […]
Consider this scenario: you have a 50 tenant rent roll, consisting of various tenant types (i.e. small inline, large inline, junior anchor, anchor, etc.), and you want to calculate the weighted average rent for each tenant type. If I asked you, what is the fastest and cleanest way to do this in Excel, what would […]
Our library of real estate Excel models has a variety of decent apartment models, including our All-in-One model and our Apartment Development Model – both robust models in their own right. However, if you’re looking for a straight multifamily (apartment) acquisition model, and don’t want all of the unnecessary components of the All-in-One (ie. office, retail, industrial modules), […]
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 […]
The topic of ground leases has come up several times in the past few weeks. Numerous A.CRE readers have emailed to ask for a purpose-built Ground Lease Valuation Model. And I’m in the process of creating an Advanced Concepts Module for our real estate financial modeling Accelerator program covering the mechanics of modeling ground leases. […]
As many of you know, I started my career in residential land development first as a broker and later as a principal. During that time, I built my fair share of residential land development Excel pro formas, modeling returns and forecasting cash flows for my clients and investor partners. I’ve since transitioned into the institutional […]
A new paper from researchers at the University of Oxford and Kings College London suggests that large language models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini don’t just spit out language, but rather develop strategic personalities. One plays nice. One retaliates. One forgives. None were explicitly trained to do this. So, what happens when you start relying […]
A couple of months ago, I shared a blog post detailing how I built a DCF Web App using an AI coding tool. What once would have required either deep technical skills or a developer’s help took less than 10 minutes to build, with ChatGPT and Lovable doing most of the heavy lifting. That experience […]
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) […]