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Using COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS Excel Functions in Real Estate Underwriting (Updated Dec 2024)

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. This increases the time it takes to perform tasks and makes it more likely they’ll commit an error.

Over time, these analysts come to discover the powerful functionality of Excel’s tools and functions that save them valuable time and reduce the chance for error. I’d like share three such functions: the COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS functions and a few ways to use them in real estate underwriting.

When Will I Use the COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS Functions?

Much of real estate underwriting and analysis requires working with and making sense of large data sets. You, the CRE professional, must analyze rent rolls with hundreds of tenants, portfolio operating statements with dozens of properties, lease agreement provisions with numerous co-tenancy clauses, and market data with years of vacancy rates and absorption figures.

When assessing these data, oftentimes you’re dealing with multiple variables – perhaps its various submarkets and property types in one data set on the market or various tenant types and buildings in one rent roll. To work with these data, you need a function that allows you to set multiple criteria to complete your calculation.

An Example Related to Real Estate

So, when might you use this in practice? Allow me to give a specific example related to real estate. Let’s imagine you’re tasked with calculating the average vacancy rate in 2025 of power centers in a given submarket. You have a large set of data containing vacancy rates of all buildings in an MSA going back ten years. How do you complete this task?

One option, is to manually find all power centers in your submarket, copy the vacancy rates in 2025 for each, and take their average. Easy? Sure, but time consuming. And what if you missed a building when you were going through the long list?

Another option, the quick, efficient, and less error-prone option, is to use the AVERAGEIFS function. Simple plugin type out AVERAGEIFS, assign submarket, property type, and year as criteria, and let Excel do the rest of the work. And on top of that, you can then calculate 2024 and 2023 as an added bonus for your boss!

The Mechanics of Using These Functions in Real Estate

First, allow me to share an example of using these three functions in real estate analysis. Then, if you need more instruction, I’ve embedded two Microsoft-developed tutorials for using the COUNTIFS and SUMIFS functions. Note, no video is included for the AVERAGEIFS function but the logic is nearly identical to the SUMIFS functions.

How to Use the COUNTIFS and SUMIFS Functions

Below find a video created by Microsoft that demonstrates how to use the COUNTIFS and SUMIFS functions.

Download the Completed File Used in this Tutorial

To make this tutorial accessible to everyone, it is offered on a “Pay What You’re Able” basis with no minimum (enter $0 if you’d like) or maximum (your support helps keep the content coming – similar real estate training exercises sell for $25- $100+). Just enter a price together with an email address to send the download link to, and then click ‘Continue’. If you have any questions about our “Pay What You’re Able” program or why we offer our models on this basis, please reach out to either Mike or Spencer.


Version Notes

v1.1

  • Misc. formatting cleanups
  • Added Version tab

v1.0

  • Initial release

Frequently Asked Questions about Using COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS in Real Estate Underwriting

These functions help streamline analysis of large, multi-variable datasets common in real estate. As Spencer writes, “Much of real estate underwriting… requires working with and making sense of large data sets,” and these tools allow analysts to apply multiple criteria to their calculations quickly and accurately.

These functions are ideal when working with large data like rent rolls, market data, or portfolio operating statements. For example, to calculate “the average vacancy rate in 2025 of power centers in a given submarket,” you can use AVERAGEIFS instead of doing it manually.

COUNTIFS counts the number of entries that meet multiple conditions.

SUMIFS sums values that meet multiple conditions.

AVERAGEIFS calculates the average of values that meet multiple conditions.
All three functions accept multiple logical criteria to filter data for precise analysis.

Use AVERAGEIFS by defining the range to average and setting criteria ranges and values. For example:
=AVERAGEIFS(VacancyRateRange, PropertyTypeRange, “Power Center”, SubmarketRange, “Submarket Name”, YearRange, 2025)
This returns the average 2025 vacancy rate for power centers in a given submarket.

These functions are commonly used with rent rolls, tenant data, market vacancy reports, lease terms, operating expenses, and multi-property financials—any dataset where filtering by multiple categories is needed.

Yes. The post includes two Microsoft-developed video tutorials on COUNTIFS and SUMIFS. While there isn’t a specific video for AVERAGEIFS, its syntax and logic are “nearly identical to the SUMIFS function.”

You can download the completed file from the tutorial via a “Pay What You’re Able” model. There is no minimum or maximum—just enter a price and your email to receive the link.


About the Author: Spencer Burton is Co-Founder and CEO of CRE Agents, an AI-powered platform training digital coworkers for commercial real estate. He has 20+ years of CRE experience and has underwritten over $30 billion in real estate across top institutional firms.

Spencer also co-founded Adventures in CRE, served as President at Stablewood, and holds a BS in International Affairs from Florida State University and a Masters in Real Estate Finance from Cornell University.