A few years back, on a sleepy Saturday afternoon while my kids were busy eating Halloween candy, I decided to create a simple real estate acquisition model in Excel for office, retail, and industrial deals. Since then, I’ve made various updates, including error fixes and functional improvements. The model calculates returns at the property and […]
Why use COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS functions in real estate? When real estate analysts first start their careers, they’re often required to work with large data sets and to transpose property and portfolio information from one format to another in Excel. At first, being unfamiliar with many of Excel’s functions, they manually perform these operations. […]
A question came up recently in the A.CRE Accelerator’s real estate waterfall modeling course regarding how to model GP Catch Up (i.e. Sponsor Catch Up) and LP Clawback provisions. I put together a quick video tutorial in response to that question, and in doing so I realized I had never shared to A.CRE a real […]
At A.CRE, we’re always exploring new ways to make our work more efficient for you and for us! Whether it’s building custom GPTs for real estate, experimenting with locally installed LLMs, or finding AI-specific tools for commercial real estate, we love to tinker. Recently, we hit on something we’ve been wanting for a while: a […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]