Posts

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Real Estate Financial Modeling Accelerator (Updated Dec 2020)

Since starting A.CRE, Michael and I have 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 topics in our blog,…
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Using Excel’s New LAMBDA Feature to Create Custom Functions for Real Estate Financial Modeling

In December 2020, Excel rolled out a new featured called LAMBDA as part of the Office Insiders (i.e. beta) program. This feature allows the user to create custom functions, which can greatly reduce duplicative formulas and reduce errors. Well…
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The Definitive Guide to Microsoft Excel for Real Estate

Microsoft Excel is the primary tool used by real estate financial modeling professionals. Even while numerous non-Excel alternatives have attempted to de-throne Excel, the 35+ year-old software has shown to be surprisingly resilient to competition.…
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DateDif: The “Secret” Excel Formula (Updated 11.14.2020)

For one reason or another, there is a perfectly functioning and pretty valuable formula that can be utilized in Excel that Microsoft has chosen to exclude from Excel's list of functions: the DateDif function. This function is a valuable…
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Use the A.CRE Geocoding Excel Add-in to Auto-Populate Latitude and Longitude in Excel

The A.CRE Geocoding Excel Add-in uses the Google Geocoding API to automatically convert a given address to latitude and longitude coordinates, or to convert a given latitude and longitude coordinate to an address. The add-in makes auto-populating…
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Custom Function to Auto-Populate Latitude and Longitude in Excel (Updated 2020)

When analyzing real estate investments in Excel, it's often necessary to include the latitude and longitude coordinates of the properties we're modeling. To do this, most of us open up Google Maps, or some other mapping tool, and find the…
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Setting Up a New Real Estate Financial Model – Date and Period Headers Plus Formatting

We've spent a lot of time here discussing and sharing different real estate models, and we've received a ton of feedback from our readers as a result. In some of that feedback we've received, several people have asked what period and date rows…
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Create Dynamic Sub-Property Type Drop-Down Menus in Excel

A few years ago, I created a tutorial on building smart drop-down menus in Excel using dynamic named ranges and data validation lists. This offered a great way to have drop-down menus in your model that could be easily changed by the user to…
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Using VBA to Hide Rows in Excel

Over the next few minutes, I will show you two techniques for automatically hiding and showing rows in Excel using VBA code. These techniques I use regularly in my real estate financial models to make for a more intuitive user experience. In…
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Using SUMPRODUCT to Calculate Weighted Average in Real Estate

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…
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How to Create Dynamic, In-Cell Buttons and Toggles in Microsoft Excel

Creating intuitive, user-friendly, visually appealing models is one aspect of mastering real estate financial modeling. One way to make your models easy for people to use and more attractive in general is to use dynamic, theme-appropriate, in-cell…
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Using Conditional Formatting in Real Estate Financial Modeling

Your real estate financial models are only as good as their ability to be used by others. Or in other words, if others can't figure out how to use your model, it isn't worth much! So when building real estate financial model templates, besides…
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How to Run Monte Carlo Simulations in Excel

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…
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Using the Floating Summary Box in Real Estate Modeling

Over the next few minutes, I'll share a great modeling tip for efficiently visualizing the more salient metrics in your real estate models. Now I should mention, this is a tip I shared a few years ago. But given the complexity of many of the…
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Using the OFFSET Function in Real Estate Financial Modeling

In a previous post, I showed you how to use the OFFSET function to create dynamic lists in Excel. As you become more comfortable using this function in real estate financial modeling, you'll find that it has almost infinite applications when…
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A.CRE 101 – Create Smart Drop-Down Menus in Real Estate Modeling

One Excel feature real estate financial modeling professionals use often is the data validation list. Where data validation is a method of limiting the possible inputs of a cell, the data validation list limits those inputs to a pre-defined…