Thursday 6 October 2011

Real Estate Template Design

By Martin Humboldt


Coming up with a good real estate template in Excel necessitates some prior consideration about the end application, factors, and measurements required. This article talks about a number of the subtleties that may help you to either make your own or select an impressive ready made Excel spreadsheet.

Among the preliminary factors is what type of assets or jobs will you makes use of the real estate template for? Is it for a residential home, multi-unit apartment construction, new building venture, or land use and leasing such as a parking zone? There are big differences in the information that should be accumulated and how it ought to be put into the Excel template, with respect to the character of your project. At an advanced level, home real estate investments require analysis of occupancy, volume of units, interior and exterior characteristics, and tax details. Commercial property investments demand more analysis of funding sources such as local taxpayer subsidies, drive-by traffic, renter contractual terms such as triple net contracts, and project financing schedules.

You should think of the way the Excel real estate template will probably be used by the individual analyzing the investment or project. Is it for accumulating basic information like tenants, property condition, number of bed rooms and restrooms, and so on? Or can it be more of a quantitative income analysis tool where you intend to type in some financial information and represent cash flows as time passes with some variables? A spreadsheet tool must be laid out in a straightforward way where the user can quickly move through cells to type in the information. It should also be simple to get the data in a database for possible future analysis. However, a quantitative formula template should be centered on capturing the information and factor multipliers then calculating forward looking cash flows with accurate mathematics and tables.

How automated would you like the real estate template? There are a couple of methods to speed up Excel spreadsheets including formulas, drop down lists, and VBA macro code. Acceleration is needed if you are frequently using the template and you wish to cut down the time it will require to do cumbersome operations like developing reports, calculating cash flows, transferring data, and picking tax scenarios. Practically every spreadsheet should have formulas incorporated which do the fundamental computations. Drop down lists help with filling in cells and parameters if there is a classified set of options. Excel macro code is quite a bit more complicated and often requires some techie understanding, but it can accomplish things like cleaning data and managing sensitivity analyses that take a considerable amount of time if performed manually, or surpass the ability of Excel to perform employing formulas.

There are a lot of other considerations contingent upon your unique situation, but this should give you some things to think about when setting up or purchasing a good real estate template.




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