Insights

Unlock Your Real Estate Investor Potential

For more than 40 years, RealData has helped real estate investors and developers navigate the road to success.

Our mission is twofold: To supply the software tools you need to evaluate commercial, residential and mixed-use income-property investments, projects and partnerships; and to provide you with the educational materials and resources to be a knowledgeable investor.

real estate investing acronyms
Education
Frank Gallinelli

35 Real Estate Acronyms Every Investor Should Know

The acronyms you encounter on your journey to building wealth in real estate may seem like a witch’s brew of random letters. But every business or profession has its secret handshakes, its unique vocabulary, and real estate is no different.

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Self-Storage Investing, commercial real estate analytics software
Education
Frank Gallinelli

Self-Storage Real Estate: Understanding Unit Occupancy, Physical Occupancy, and Economic Occupancy

In my previous post, I discussed what I believe are some of the most important pros and cons of investing in self-storage real estate.

As with most real estate sectors, self-storage features some terms that are particular to this property type — specifically in how owners describe occupancy: Unit Occupancy, Physical Occupancy, and Economic Occupancy. Let’s review them:

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Mistakes That Real Estate Investors Should Avoid, real estate investment evaluation
Education
Frank Gallinelli

Seven Mistakes to Avoid When You Invest in Rental Property

Real estate has probably been the best vehicle for building wealth since, well, forever – and income-producing real estate (aka rental property) may be the type of real estate that offers the greatest opportunities to small and mid-size investors.

But nothing worthwhile comes without a few potential pitfalls. You can and certainly should prosper as an investor, but to do so means being mindful of some mistakes that could derail your success. Let’s consider a few of the most important:

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Real Estate Property Management, property investment analysis
Real Estate Investing
Frank Gallinelli

Property Management: Exploring Trends and Tools for Savvy Investors

For those of us whose experience with rental property goes back a few decades (maybe even more than a few), the term “property management” conjures up images of ledger books for recording rent payments and expenses, receipt pads for tenants who paid by cash, and a plumber or two on our landline’s speed dial.

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Education
Frank Gallinelli

Real Estate Expense Recoveries—What are they, how do they work? (Part 1)

If you’ve gotten involved as a landlord or tenant with non-residential real estate, such as retail or office buildings, then you have probably encountered a phenomenon that may go by any of several names: expense recoveries, expense reimbursements, pass-throughs, or common area maintenance (CAM) charges. What exactly is this phenomenon and how does it work?

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Education
Frank Gallinelli

The Case of the Mysterious Sinking IRR

Users of our Real Estate Investment Analysis program sometimes call us with questions that are not about the software but about the underlying analysis. If we had a “greatest hits” list for those questions the all-time winner would be this: “My cash flow goes up each year; the value of the property goes up each year; but when I look at the Internal Rate of Return, it goes down almost every year. What’s up with that?” To see how this can happen, let’s take a look at two very simple examples.

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laptop with regression analysis graph
Education
Frank Gallinelli

The Single-Family Home as a Rental Property Investment — Using Regression to Estimate Value

Regression – no, it’s not what your family and friends accuse you of when you want to trade in the mini-van for a two-seater stick-shift convertible (well, maybe it is, but that’s a topic for a different article). If you’re familiar with our RealData software, my online video courses, and my other blog posts here, then you know that I’m usually talking about income-producing property like multi-family, retail, office, or the like — seldom about single-family homes. And when we estimate the value of most income properties, we typically do so by looking at their income stream.

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Education
Frank Gallinelli

MIRR — How It Works

From our experience, it appears that Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is the metric of choice for many, if not most, real estate investors. However, you may be aware that there are a few issues with IRR that can cause you some vexation: If you expect a negative cash flow at some point in the future, then the IRR computation may simply fail to come up with a unique result; and with your positive cash flows, IRR may be a bit too optimistic about the rate at which you can reinvest them. For these reasons, a variation on IRR, called Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR), can be very important. When you see how it works, then you’ll also see that it gives you the opportunity to deal with IRR’s shortcomings.

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