Real Estate Financial Modeling Accelerator (Updated April 2024)
Prior to launching the Accelerator program, Michael and I fielded email after email requesting a more structured real estate financial modeling training program on the site.
Over the years, we've covered hundreds of real estate modeling…
Excel-Based Restaurant Selection Tool for the Overly Indecisive
We're celebrating some much deserved time off from work, and so what better way to spend the time than to make a completely unnecessary (but fun!) Excel model. I call this the indispensable Excel tool for the overly indecisive, and it's basically…
Hotel Proforma Basics – Hotel Cash Flow Projection
Hotels are a unique asset in the commercial real estate world and are underwritten differently as a result. Probably the most obvious difference is the duration of the 'lease term' of the tenant, which is usually daily to weekly. Another major…
Deep Dive – Sources of Capital: Real Estate Private Equity
Capital for commercial real estate investments is generally sourced from one or more of the following buckets: public equity, public debt, private equity, or private debt. In my experience, few people fully understand these four buckets of capital,…
Understanding Treatment of Time 0 in the All-in-One Model
I received a very astute question/concern from a user of our All-in-One(Ai1) model in our Ai1 Support Forum late last month. I initially set out to answer the question in writing, but the more I thought about my response, the more I concluded…
All About Cap Ex
In this post, we are going to take a deeper look into capital expenditures. What it is and how we account for it in cre underwriting.
Capital expenditures, commonly referred to as Cap Ex, are expenses that occur outside of normal operating…
The A.CRE Method For Doing Cap Rate Mental Math – Practice Tool
At the bottom of this post is a downloadable practice tool for the A.CRE Method for doing cap rate mental math. The tool will generate an endless number of random cap rates and NOIs to practice with and will walk you step by step through how…
A.CRE 101: How To Use The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Method To Value Income Producing Property
The Discounted Cash Flow Method is a method to value a project by taking all future projected cash flows of the project and discounting them back to time zero (date of purchase) using a predetermined discount rate (the discount rate when used…
How to Use Debt Yield to Calculate Loan Amount
In our glossary of commercial real estate terms, we recently answered the question: what is debt yield? As a follow up to that entry, I thought I’d expand on the concept of debt yield by showing you how lenders use debt yield to come up with…
The State of Real Estate Crowdfunding
Following the housing crash of 2007 - as regulations were introduced and credit tightened - emerging companies were left with little or no access to the capital markets. In an effort to ameliorate the credit crunch, Congress drew up the Jumpstart…
San Francisco Development Explosion! – Interactive Map & Side Project
San Francisco's downtown area is currently going through an unprecedented, skyline redefining transformation. So many incredible developers and architects are in the process of leaving their mark on this city and it's all happening or will…
Understanding Taxes Series: Part 2 – Exceptions to The PAL Rules
The PAL Rules - A Brief Background
The PAL Rules, or Passive Activity Loss Rules, were enacted in 1986 to curb rampant abuses from people using real estate and businesses to generate huge losses to offset income taxes. It used to be that you…
Understanding Taxes Series: Part 1 – Depreciation
Investing in real estate provides some tremendous tax incentives in the USA compared to other investments and is an important component to understanding real estate investing. Given the positive response I've received to my Understanding Leases…
Understanding Leases: Office Buildings – Part 2b
Grossing Up Reimbursable Expenses in ARGUS
This post and video are a follow up to a post written back in late October discussing grossing up reimbursable expenses. If you haven’t gotten to read that yet, you can do so by clicking here:…
Understanding Leases: Office Buildings – Part 2a
Grossing Up Operating Expenses – What, How, Why, and its impact on the Three Common Bill-back Methods
A common practice in office leases is to gross up the variable portion of the reimbursable expenses. Grossing up expenses is when the…
Understanding Leases: Office Buildings – Part 1
Billing Back Reimbursable Operating Expenses – Three Common Approaches for Office Buildings
(ARGUS video example to follow next week)
The three most common approaches to expense reimbursements in office leases are the (1) triple-net,…