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- THE REALDATA BLOG -

Learn by Example

I’ve seen a great deal of interest in the real estate investment case studies that are part of my investment analysis video course — so I’ve spun those cases off as a new mini course, one where you can learn by example.

The cases deal with three different property types:

  • apartment building,
  • mixed-use, and
  • triple-net-leased

They’re similar to those I cover in my grad-school course at Columbia, and I’ve designed them with several purposes in mind:

  • To give you practice working through bumper-to-bumper deal analysis. On what terms does each deal make sense to you?
  • To introduce special situations that you need to understand, such as expense recoveries and triple-net leases.
  • To give you an opportunity to put yourself inside the deal as if you were a real participant, to think as an investor thinks — beyond the numbers, beyond the surface data, as if real money were on the table.

Once you’ve learned about deal analysis with this mini course, you’ll probably want to take the complete course, covering detailed real estate investment metrics, partnerships, development, and more. So here’s more good news:

When you upgrade to the bigger course, you’ll get full credit for  this mini course.

Learn more about my case study course


Sharpening Your Pencil – Create Better Analyses With Published Real Estate Data

It’s tempting to rush through a property analysis by simply reviewing the broker’s sell sheet, plugging the data into your favorite software program and printing the results. You’re done, right?

Think again.

We’re not saying the seller isn’t providing accurate income and expense data, but is he or she giving you a complete picture of all the issues? Consider such questions as:

  • What is an appropriate cap rate for the market in which the property is located; and more specifically, what’s the prevailing cap rate for the particular sector, such as multi-family or self-storage?
  • What seems like a realistic assumption for revenue and expense growth over time?
  • How have vacancy rates been trending for the area, and what might those trends say about future leases, renewals, and demand for space?

You’ll probably need to look beyond the owner’s statement to build your best property analysis and thus create your best chance at a successful investment. Thankfully, you can find a number of sources online to help you achieve accuracy, and along with it, some peace of mind.  You can find data on:

  • Metropolitan and submarket area cap rates
  • Average rents by market sector
  • Vacancy rates
  • Number of units available and sold
  • Sales and rental comps
  • Custom reports based on your subject property

The following are some of the best-known sources of data:

 

Zillow

https://www.zillow.com/research/data/

You’re probably already familiar with this site, at least in regard to its home value estimates. The focus here is residential but investors can benefit from their extensive rental information, which is provided by county, metro area, city, zip code, and even neighborhood.  You download data in Excel format. We found their series of 5 to 7 years of data particularly useful for evaluating rental trends.

You can also learn about their methodology here.

 

Moody’s Analytics (formerly Reis)

https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/

Reis has been a source of commercial real estate data for nearly four decades, and say they are a “…source for property and market intelligence, including vacancy rates, rent levels, cap rates, new construction, rent comparables, sales comparables, valuation estimates, and capital market trends across eight major commercial real estate sectors.

You can get more info about their data products at https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/products/

 

Costar

http://www.costar.com

Really big data commercial real estate here, for owners, brokers, appraisers, lenders, even institutional investors

They say you can search up to 1 million sales records, across all property types at https://www.costar.com/products/costar-comps or access property-level data, including vacancy, rents, sales comps for multifamily, office, industrial, or retail property at https://www.costar.com/products/analytics.

 

Compstak

https://compstak.com/enterprise

Compstak serves up office, retail and industrial lease data for “leading institutional investors, lenders, and owners across the US and UK.”  Subscribe to their entire database or, if you are broker, appraiser or researcher, trade your own data for theirs and gain access to Compstak data for free.

Real Capital Analytics

https://www.rcanalytics.com/solutions-for/investors-owners/

From macro trends to extensive data on individual properties, Real Capital Analytics offers data on “$18 trillion of sales, recapitalizations and financings.”  Contact them for pricing.

 

Redfin

https://www.redfin.com/blog/data-center

Redfin is a residential brokerage firm but offers a wide variety of property sales and trend data.  Of particular note is their annual report of the “Hottest Neighborhoods in the US.”

While you may not be an investor in single family homes, consider that the market for your commercial property is linked to the health of the local residential market.

 

LoopNet

http://www.loopnet.com/salescomps/

Gain access to their database of 1.6 million sales listings.  Cost is $175 per month.  They also offer, at no charge, sales and lease trends for hundreds of localities across the US.  See http://www.loopnet.com/markettrends/

 

What data sources do you use? Share your thoughts by commenting below.


New Software Updates, Equity Multiple Calculation

This week marks the release of a new feature in our REIA product line as well as important updates to our development programs for the Mac.

We have just added the Equity Multiple calculation to both REIA Express and Pro, for both Windows and Macintosh. Download the latest builds of these products to view this metric on the Analysis of Resale and Summary Cash Flow and Resale Analysis reports. You will also find Equity Multiple on our Decision Maker sensitivity analysis dashboard.

Also newly released are updates to C/I Development and On Schedule for the Mac.  These two updates bring these products in line with their Windows counterparts by adding features such as waterfall returns in the Partnership modules.

RealData customers should open their software and look for the “Check for Updates” button on the Welcome worksheet, or login to their customer account to download the latest release of these products.

 


New REIA v18 Releases for the New Year – Mac and Windows

With the new year comes the release of REIA version 18 for Mac. This release has all the same features, calculations and reports that are found in the Windows release. Like all of our Mac  products, it will run under Mac Excel/Office 2011 only. We continue to wait for Microsoft to make fixes and improvements to Excel 2016 so that our software will run correctly in that version. REIA v18 on the Mac runs on Excel 2011, Excel 2016 and Excel/Office 365.

Also available for immediate download is a maintenance update for REIA v18 Windows. This update fixes minor issues in the Cover Sheet and Cash Flow / Resale Assumptions reports. Customers who own a license of the software can download the latest build 1.07 from either the Welcome worksheet of their product or via their customer account at realdata.com

Keep track of all latest releases on our builds page.

 


New software builds across the Windows product line

We have recently rolled out new builds of all of our Windows products.  The main objective was to include a new in-house PDF printer which replaces the third party product we have relied upon for over a decade.

The new printer provides a number of advantages:

  • It immediately solves a print fail issue that arose with Windows 10.  All customers who have Windows 10 are encouraged to update to the latest build immediately.
  • We created the new PDF printer in-house so we can more quickly diagnose and respond to any issues that may arise.
  • Our solution is a much smaller file and runs faster.

Also included in this round of updates are cosmetic and other minor changes.

All customers running the latest release of our products should download the latest builds – do this via the “Check for Updates” button on the Welcome worksheet of your product or login to your customer account at realdata.com

View the latest builds of each product on our builds page.

 


New Lease Renewal Assumptions feature for REIA Professional

Making assumptions and entering data about commercial lease revenue — especially rollovers — was often a tedious undertaking. Until now.

Enter our latest game changer: REIA Professional’s Lease Rollover Assumptions

What is it?

Our new Lease Rollover Assumptions feature (LRA) is a way for you to store sets of parameters about different commercial lease rollover scenarios, parameters which you can use over and over when entering tenant information in REIA Professional. What is the probability that a current tenant will renew? How long do you think the space will be vacant if a tenant chooses not to renew?

Build your assumptions sets, add your tenants, and apply the LRAs. Done.

You rely on our products to crunch the numbers quickly and accurately so you can make the best and most profitable commercial investment decisions. LRA brings you a whole new level of power and speed.

How it works

First, create a set of assumptions on the new LRA worksheet.  Enter values for months vacant, rollover probability, new and market rent, etc.

lra4

Then apply those assumptions to a tenant just by selecting the option on the Commercial Income worksheet:

lra5

How to get it

If you already own a license of REIA Professional version 18, then you just need to download the latest build from your customer account at realdata.com

If you have a previous version, consider upgrading.  Upgrade costs can be found here.

Learn More

We have a knowledgebase article which walks you through the setup and configuration of the LRA feature.


New Version of our Income-Property Video Tutorial

Screenshot 2016-06-30 09.36.08We’ve just released an updated version of our video tutorial, How to Evaluate an Income Property Investment with REIA Pro. We’ve given the video a serious makeover — additional content, better audio and graphics, greater emphasis on how to use RealData’s REIA software to perform an analysis — and have added a seventh video that provides an overview of some of the software’s more advanced features.

•    You get access to the web-based video series on our new e-learning platform. Watch it online at your convenience — on your desktop or mobile device.
•    The property analysis is based on a sample case study of a mixed-use property.
•    The series uses our REIA Pro product to analyze the investment, but many of of the features portrayed in the videos are found in the REIA Express edition.
•    The series is presented by Frank Gallinelli, founder of RealData, Inc.
•    Includes seven videos with over 2 hours of instruction

If you’ve already purchased the original release of this series, you’ll receive an email with instructions on how to get the new version at no charge. If you haven’t purchased it before, we invite you to download the case study and view a lesson-by-lesson synopsis.


New REIA Professional version 18 for Windows

This week we introduce version 18 of Real Estate Investment Analysis, Professional Edition.  It is available immediately for purchase, either for 30-day licenses or time-unlimited licenses. We offer upgrade paths for those who have been with us through previous releases.  Currently, this version is available for Windows only.

What is New?

  • Fiscal Year Option – Sometimes a perfectly obvious and useful feature is overlooked.  In the past year, a number of users suddenly started asking about the option to display data with fiscal year headings — i.e., Year 1, Year 2, etc. — rather than with calendar years. Even RealData’s founder, Frank Gallinelli, insisted on this new feature when he realized his grad students could follow a presentation more easily this way! Now you can have this by ticking a single checkbox in the General settings to make this change throughout the program.

Fiscal Year Option in REIA Pro

Fiscal Year Headings in REIA Pro v18

  •  Sale-Year Cap Rate: Choose Year-by-Year – Nothing lasts forever, not even market cap rates. You might want to test scenarios where the so-called “terminal cap rate” — the rate you expect to be in play in the future — rises or falls over time. Now for every potential resale year, you can elect to use a different cap rate if you like.
  • Syndication Fees – Users of our Partnership Analysis module have been asking for the ability to handle syndication fees, and of course we listened. Account for acquisition or disposition fees, as well as ongoing asset management fees.Partnership Syndication Fees
  • New Report Templates for Graphic and Property Narrative – You now have two free-form pages where you can create your own report pages. One is designed to accommodate a graphic. It could be a property photo, floor plan, map — any image file. The other is a property narrative, where you can use as much or as little of two text columns to tell this property’s story. You can style the text, as well as create paragraphs and headings.Narrative Report new in REIA v18Picture Report REIA v18
  • Zoom Worksheet ViewGlobally adjust view +10% +25% etc. – Perhaps your desktop has one screen resolution and your laptop something totally different. And maybe neither of them looks good in the default view when you open the program. In the past you had to change the “zoom” setting for each worksheet individually, but we’ve added a function that allows you to apply a global view setting across all the sheets. So whether you want big type or small, the solution is a click away.
  • Even more – Drag and drop the order of reports when printing; get help from improved and expanded documentation, cell notes, and knowledgebase

New Build Release for REIA Pro v17

Yesterday we released build 1.12 of REIA Pro which fixes two minor issues:  first, the Hide Taxes option was not working correctly with one report and second, we have implemented an improvement to the code which controls the saving and closing of the workbook so that you will not be prompted to save the file if you have not made any changes.

All customers who have a license of the REIA Professional v17 software are encouraged to update their software.  Just click on the “Check for Updates” button on the Welcome worksheet, or login to your account at realdata.com to get the latest installer file.


New Updates Add Waterfall Returns to On Schedule and C/I Development programs

Need waterfall returns for your equity partners in your development projects?  You asked and we have delivered by adding this new feature to both our On Schedule and C/I Development programs.  This feature is available at no charge to customers with licenses of the latest versions of these products.  At this time, this feature is available for Windows products only.

Update your software to version 5, build 1.16 for On Schedule and version 6, build 1.17 for CID by clicking on the “Check for Updates” button on the Welcome worksheet of your product, or by logging into your customer account and downloading the latest installer file.

What are Waterfall Tiers?

With this new option, you can now configure IRR achievement hurdles for your limited partners / non-managing members. Enter up to four different tiers with different IRR rates, just as in our REIA Professional program.

waterfall

 

If you have a license of a previous version of On Schedule or CID, consider upgrading to gain access to this and other powerful new features.  See our upgrade page for pricing and more information.

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