Microsoft Excel is the primary tool used by real estate financial modeling professionals. Even while numerous non-Excel alternatives have attempted to de-throne Excel, the 35+ year-old software has shown to be surprisingly resilient to competition. And thus, if you intend to work in real estate you must be proficient in Excel. So what does it […]
It’s been the go-to line ever since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2022 and AI became a talking point in every office: “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will.” I’ve said that – or some variation of that – myself in dozens of conversations with CRE friends, peers, and clients. And […]
Over the course of my career, I’ve modeled hundreds of real estate investments, from large portfolio roll-ups to complex mixed-use developments. And one issue I’ve consistently run into, especially when modeling portfolio or mixed-use cash flows, is this: the first cash flow in an IRR range is often not negative. The problem? Excel’s built-in XIRR […]
On a flight from Chicago to Miami last week, I built something I’m really excited to share for free: my AI-powered Lease Date Extraction Tool. Starting with a simple ChatGPT prompt, followed by a back-and-forth with Replit’s Agent 3 multi-agent coding assistant, what in the past would have taken a team of engineers months to […]
Before moving to the principal side of the business, I began my career as a self-described real estate investment specialist, largely working as a land broker but dabbling in other areas including the popular “single-family flip” space. In all honesty, I wasn’t qualified for the title. In fact, I had little to no actual experience […]
In the world of AI, the big three – OpenAI’s Custom GPTs, Anthropic’s Claude Projects, and Google’s Gemini Gems – are quick-and-easy ways to interact with large language models (LLMs). Whether you’re a real estate professional looking to build a custom assistant or a founder aiming to scale operations through automation, these tools offer a […]
For several years now, our library of real estate models has been lacking a robust ground-up apartment development model. Sure, our All-in-One (Ai1) model has the capability to model multifamily development deals, but it’s more a generalist tool than a specialized one. As a result, I’ve found it wanting when used to model developments. So a few […]
What better way to spend some free time over the Thanksgiving holiday, than to record myself completing a real estate private equity technical interview exercise! While I’ve offered help with the real estate technical interview in the past, I’ve never just grabbed an actual technical interview case study and walked our readers through how I […]
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 […]