Entries by Spencer Burton

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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 […]

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All About Real Estate Careers in Government and Non-Profit (Updated Aug 2024)

A host of real estate related jobs are available at government and non-profit organizations. Examples of roles in this area might include business development professionals working with local developers and real estate investors to coordinate and encourage public-private partnerships; managers of real estate assets owned by these types of organizations; and real estate professionals working with investment incentive […]

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How to Run Monte Carlo Simulations in Excel (Updated Aug 2024)

So you want to run Monte Carlo simulations in Excel, but your project isn’t large enough or you don’t do this type of probabilistic analysis enough to warrant buying an expensive add-in. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Excel’s built-in functionality allows for stochastic modeling, including running as many simulations as your computer’s processing power […]

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Analyzing Value-Add Investments in Real Estate Using Yield-on-Cost (Updated Aug 2024)

So a question recently came in around why a commercial real estate investor would use the Yield-on-Cost metric to assess a value-add real estate investment. This question came on the heals of several other questions also related to development spread (i.e. investment spread) and market cap rate. So I thought I’d put a post together […]