Excel Tips for Real Estate Private Equity

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Introduction

Leveraged Breakdowns offers the best real estate private equity course. We are megafund insiders who know a thing or two about the investments process. With over $10B of closed acquisitions, we have experience with everything ranging from asset-level purchases to public company take-privates. If you’re looking to understand the real estate private equity game, there is no better place to start than with Leveraged Breakdowns.

This post in particular will focus on some core Excel tips to boost your own real estate private equity skills. These are some basic things but are helpful for any beginner to master, especially since you’ll be spending hundreds of hours each month in Excel.

Don’t Touch that Mouse!

You should learn to model in Excel with every shortcut available. If you have to touch the mouse to do anything, you’re probably doing it wrong. You should be able to navigate excel entirely with your keyboard. Below are some helpful navigational tips, but the list goes on:

  • Shift+Arrow-Key: This allows you to select a range of adjacent cells
  • Ctrl+Arrow-Key: This allows you to jump from one non-blank cell to the next non-blank cell, skipping the blank cells in-between
  • Ctrl+Shift+Arrow-Key: This allows you to jump from one non-blank cell to another non-blank cell, highlighting the cells in-between
  • Ctrl+Spacebar: This highlights an entire column
  • Shift+Spacebar: This highlights an entire row
  • Alt-W-S: Freeze panes at cursor. This allows you to always show the first few rows and columns when scrolling around the workbook. This is particularly helpful for keeping track of dates and row titles when working in a large spreadsheet.
  • Ctrl+Home: This takes you to cell A1 (or the left cell if you froze panes)
  • Ctrl+End: This takes you to the final cell with data. There is no data anywhere after this cell, so you always know where to find the absolute end of the workbook.

Font Formatting

On the formatting side, a few universal rules. First, font colors: hardcodes should always be blue, links to other worksheets should always be green, and formulas should always be black. When displaying financials, the top row should always have a currency sign (such as a dollar sign or euro symbol). The other rows should not have currency signs, unless it is a subtotal. Percentages should always end with a percentage sign, even consecutively. You can see examples of this type of formatting in the best real estate private equity course available, Breaking down REPE.

Macabacus is Worth the Money

Macabus is a godsend. Macabacus is a plugin that offers a suite of productivity-boosting products for Excel and Powerpoint. If you wish to model quickly and efficiently, installing Macabacus is a no-brainer. The ability to have smart tracing of precedent and dependent cells alone pays for itself in time saved. I’m not even being paid to say this, their software is just that good. I highly recommend Macabacus for anybody doing financial analysis in Excel, and I consider it one of the core real estate private equity skills.

Location: New York, NY, USA

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