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 […]
In a recent post, I made the case that AI and financial modeling follow the same logic as long division and calculators. Learn the mechanics first. Once you’ve got them, the tool multiplies your output. The calculator only helps if you understand what it’s computing. That post was the argument. This one is the demo. […]
If you use Claude often, Claude Skills are how you teach it to work the way you do, without repeating yourself every time. Instead of pasting long instructions in every new chat, you write down your process once as a reusable Skill, save it, and then call that behavior with a short, natural request whenever […]
In Mrs. Jackson’s fourth grade class, and I’m guessing each of you had your own Mrs. Jackson, I learned to do long division by hand. Three-digit numbers, four-digit numbers, the whole bit. Pencil, paper, and that little ladder of subtraction and bring-downs that took forever and felt, even as a nine-year-old, like the most inefficient […]
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) […]
I’ve been working on a project to make our library of Excel models AI-ready. The idea is straightforward — pair every A.CRE Excel model with an AI Skill, a packaged set of instructions and reference files that teaches an AI assistant how to operate that specific model on your behalf. The Apartment Acquisition Model is […]
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, […]
I’ve been working on a project to make our library of Excel models AI-ready. The idea is straightforward – pair every A.CRE Excel model with an AI Skill for CRE, a packaged set of instructions and reference files that teaches an AI assistant how to operate that specific real estate model on your behalf. The […]
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. […]
On a recent live follow-up workshop, we took the Multiplier Framework out of theory and into one of the most important (and most unsolved) problems in CRE AI: data. Your AI is only as good as what you give it. Without access to real data, it sounds confident, produces something that looks professional, and is […]
Back in 2022, when most of the commercial real estate industry had never heard of ChatGPT, we started writing about it. Since then, we’ve published hundreds of pieces of AI content and built AI.Edge, the largest community of CRE professionals leaning into AI. At the time, it felt early and experimental, and it was not […]
AI is not replacing expertise. It is revealing who has it. The professionals who have spent years building real judgment, real methodology, and real domain knowledge are discovering something unexpected: AI does not compete with them. It amplifies them. The ones who have been going through the motions are discovering something else entirely. In this […]
On a recent live follow-up workshop, we took the Multiplier Framework out of “high level theory” and applied it to one of the most important (and most overlooked) concepts in AI productivity: skills. Every CRE professional has methodology they have developed over years of real deals, and right now most of that knowledge lives only […]
Over the past year, we’ve been experimenting heavily with (and successfully using) AI coding tools to push the boundaries of what’s possible in commercial real estate. We’ve used v0 to quickly scope frontend designs, and we’ve spun up various web apps using tools like Replit, Bolt.new, Lovable, and Cursor to support everything from content creation […]