This past week, we held our monthly ‘technical AMA‘ where I answer technical questions from the audience. These questions usually cover nuanced elements of real estate financial modeling or the application of artificial intelligence in real estate. And during this week’s session, we had a hearty discussion about our A.CRE AI Assistant GPT that our […]
This week, I’ll be hosting my monthly A.CRE Ask Me Anything (AMA) where we dive into various technical topics, and AI in CRE often comes up. Last month, someone asked me to show the group how to install a Large Language Model (LLM) on their computer—essentially a personal ChatGPT that runs locally. So, I figured it […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
That first job in real estate, most likely at the analyst-level, will be one of the most important jobs – if not the most important job – of your real estate career. Now don’t misunderstand me. Failures can be overcome, wrong decisions can be made right, and mid-career pivots can be successfully executed. But landing a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A childhood friend called me this week and asked for a favor. He is the lender on a private real estate loan and was wanting a way to personally service the loan. Namely, he needed a tool to issue monthly invoices, track the principal vs interest paid in each month, and calculate the current loan […]
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 […]
In my experience, using the SUMPRODUCT function in Excel to calculate weighted average is one of the most oft-used Excel techniques in real estate financial modeling. I learned this technique on day one of my first real estate internship and I continue to use it at least once a week to this day. So in […]
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 […]
Over the years, Michael and I have built and shared numerous real estate equity waterfall models, all multi-tiered and most with internal rate of return (IRR) hurdles. And as our readers have downloaded those models, I’ve received dozens of requests for an equity waterfall model with a simpler partnership structure. This model seeks to be an […]
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 […]