Excel Tips for Real Estate Private Equity

-

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Real Estate PE Technical Interview Questions I Ask at My Megafund

-
This post includes technical questions that I ask when interviewing candidates at my real estate private equity megafund. These questions are softballs meant to test your basic grasp of easy concepts. If you struggle with these real estate PE interview questions to any degree, then you’re not yet up to par. If you need to brush up, I highly recommend you check out Leveraged Breakdowns , the premier resource for real estate private equity education. Practice Until These Technical Questions Feel Like Baby Math Your interviewer considers the following technical real estate private equity interview questions to be easy, baseline checks of your skill. Practice until you’re comfortable in a high-stress interview. Also, make sure your mental math skills are tight. If not, there’s plenty of basic apps and websites out there that will help you practice. What is NOI? Question: What is NOI? What are the most common items included in NOI? Answer: Net operating income (“NOI”) is the st
Read more

Don’t Look Stupid When Discussing Yield Maintenance

-
The key to landing your first job in real estate private equity is to crush the interview. As an outsider to the industry, though, you run the risk of looking like an outsider if you don’t know the terminology forward and backward. No one wants to see that look on the interviewer’s face when you just said something that proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about. At Leveraged Breakdowns , we are committed to helping you become fluent in the language of real estate private equity and common interview questions. We also give you hands-on training with our real estate investment analysis online courses . Why isn’t it Just A Prepayment Penalty? Lenders love to throw in penalties in the event a loan pays off early. The early payoff could be due to the borrower refinancing or it could be due to sale of the property. The lender doesn’t really care. When lenders deploy capital, they do not want to see it come back early. They are managing cash flows and earning the spread be
Read more

REPE Fund Profile Series - Part Nine: BentallGreenOak

-
Welcome to Part Nine of our Fund Profile Series. So far, our series has worked its way through the first eight entries of the top 50 global real estate private equity (REPE) firms, according to the 2020 PERE 100 list. Here, each of our Fund Profiles briefly summarizes each fund’s history, as well as examining the details of the funds themselves. And we also outline a few of each firm’s key real estate equity investments in recent years to help you prepare for your upcoming REPE technical interview (s).  Following on from Part Eight of the series focused on the Rockpoint Group, today’s post will take a closer look at BentallGreenOak. Key facts about BentallGreenOak The BentallGreenOak group of companies was formed in 2019 after the North American real estate asset management arm of Sun Life Financial Inc (at the time), Bentall Kennedy, purchased a majority stake in GreenOak Real Estate from the Tetragon Financial Group. After the deal closed, BentallGreenOak became part of SLC Ma
Read more