Category Archives: Commercial Model

Version 9 – Exciting New Features

We are excited to announce many new improvements to our discounted cash flow models. These improvements have been in development and testing for several months and expand the capabilities of models as well as simply some of the processes. A list of these additions/improvements is available below:

Reserve Accounts

One of the new exciting features in this version is the addition of three Reserve Accounts. These accounts can be funded at the start of your project and/or contributed to annually.

These Reserve Accounts will allow you to offset the expenses that occur (including taxes) which might result in a cash need in any given year.

Upon the sale of the project, any remaining funds are returned through the cash flow of the final year. This can have a significant positive impact on the IRR.

Rent Roll

We are excited to announce that we have completely redesigned our Rent Roll and how it operates. After many months of development and testing, we believe that this new system will be easier to understand and use than the previous rent roll.

The new rent roll spans 11 columns and operates in a vertical fashion. As before, you only need to insert data into the orange cells.

Rent Roll

Adding a New Tenant

To add a new tenant to the rent roll, simply begin typing on the next line. If the Suite number is different than the suite above it, the system will recognize it as a new tenant. If the Suite number matches the entry above, the system will recognize the entry as a continuation of the same lease.

New Tenant

Rent Steps

The new rent roll can accommodate rent steps for any tenant. In order to add a new rent step, simply start a new line under that with the step dates and lease rate. The system will recognize a continuation of a tenant’s lease based on the Suite number. If a date between lease steps is entered incorrectly, the system will shade the cell red to alert you.

Download Now

In addition to many bug fixes throughout, we have put a lot of time and energy into refining the presentation of these models. Please download today and let us know your thoughts!

A New Tool to Calculate Step Rents

One of the biggest issues when calculating step rents  in the Commercial model is that the model assumes that all rent steps occur at year-end.  If a rental rate changes mid-year users had to manually calculate a blended rate for that year and enter it into the rent roll growth area.  RPM is excited to introduce a new tool to easily calculate blended rates for step rents.

You will notice on the Rent Roll tab of the Commercial and mixed-use models that there is a new orange button above the rent growth section.  To create a blended rental rate in a give year, select the cell for the year that the particular rent will be increasing and click the new orange button.  You will be asked to enter a new rental rate and any associated downtime/free rent.  It will then calculate the blended rental rate for that year along with the next year based on rent growth from column “M” (if any).  This should make Step Rent scenarios much more simple to calculate.

BlendedRate

You will then be asked to confirm the new blended rate before it is applied.

BlendedRateApprove

How it works

The  way this new feature works is that it uses the rate in the prior year to create a blended rate in the current year.  It then goes forward and inputs the new rental rate in the next year.

This works very well for tenants whose step rents are spaced more than one year apart because there will always be a full year at the new contract rate which the model will use for the next blended rate. However for tenants with annual step rents you will notice that in the second step the model will attempt to use the prior blended rate as the prior rental rate.  Be sure to change the Prior Rental Rate to the full annual rent rate for the prior year.

BlendedRate-PriorYr

We hope this new feature is helpful to you and look forward  to hearing your feedback.