Creating intuitive, user-friendly, visually appealing models is one aspect of mastering real estate financial modeling. One way to make your models easy for people to use and more attractive in general is to use dynamic, theme-appropriate, in-cell buttons (ie. a button that changes text, font, background based on certain logic) and toggles (i.e. buttons to […]
I’m regularly asked to expand my single family home construction pro forma to analyze the construction of more than one home. I’ve contemplated adding that functionality to the model, but it is such a custom task that no template could really cover even a majority of multi-home scenarios. So instead, I thought I’d show you […]
I’m often asked to share models centered around residential development and home building. This is an area of real estate I’m completely comfortable in, since I spent the first 10 years of my career in new residential development. Not surprisingly, I’ve assembled a decent size library of Excel pro formas for land developers and home […]
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 side […]
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 […]
I’ve fielded a handful of Cash-on-Cash (CoC) return questions of late. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post on what the Cash-on-Cash return metric tells me about a potential real estate investment. This article is a primer, if you will, on when this metric is helpful to use in your analysis […]
We received a question from an A.CRE reader this week that I thought warranted a thorough response. The question was, and I paraphrase, “I am an LP looking for models to help vet syndication deals. Do you have any models that can be used to evaluate a deal from the perspective of an LP, as […]
In an effort to provide greater instruction on how to use our All-in-One Underwriting Tool for Real Estate Development and Acquisition, we’ve developed a series of walkthrough videos and posts on the methodology behind the various components of the model. This walkthrough, our first in the series, will detail how the Permanent Debt Module is […]
Your real estate financial models are only as good as their ability to be used by others. Or in other words, if others can’t figure out how to use your model, it isn’t worth much! So when building real estate financial model templates, besides using Modeling Best Practices, I personally employ a variety of techniques […]
So you’ve made it past the HR screening interview. You have the education and experience the company is looking for, but now they want to be sure you possess the real estate financial modeling skills necessary to do the job. They’ve asked you to take part in a multi-hour real estate technical interview. In that interview, they’ll […]
A concept common to real estate partnership structures, preferred return refers to the preference given to a certain class of equity partners when distributing available cash flow. The preferred return is generally calculated as either a percentage return on contributed capital or a given multiple on contributed capital, and must first be paid before common […]
Pre-2008, I bought and sold my fair share of single family homes – both for investment purposes (rental or flips) and to live in. In those days, almost everyone was “investing” in residential real estate – hence the market crash. I personally don’t have any plans to get back into buying and selling homes, beyond […]
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 […]
Most of the Excel tools we share on Adventures in CRE are real estate financial models, but occasionally we’ll venture into building other CRE-related tools. Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a real estate acquisition checklist that can be used by real estate acquisition teams to track the progress of their due […]
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 […]