Mastering Excel: A vital skill for career progression
More and more employers are looking for multi-skilled staff – preferring to hire someone who can both manage and analyse assets. Whether you’re a recent graduate embarking on your career or a seasoned professional looking to enhance your abilities, mastering Excel can significantly elevate your career trajectory. So today we’re exploring why Excel proficiency is so important in Real Estate and provide some tips for you to quickly improve your skills.
Excel serves as the backbone of real estate analysis, offering powerful tools and functionalities to analyse data, create financial models, and generate decision influencing insights. From valuing properties to assessing investment opportunities, Excel empowers real estate professionals to make informed decisions and provide invaluable insights to clients and stakeholders.
One of the fundamental uses of Excel in real estate analysis is financial modelling – a hot topic over at Excel in Property! Excel allows analysts to create complex financial models to evaluate the performance (or potential performance) of investors in a way that locked box software can’t. You can forecast cash flows, conduct sensitivity analysis, identify risks, and optimise returns. And with Excel’s powerful array of data manipulation and visualisation tools, analysts can organise vast datasets, analyse trends, and present findings in clear compelling formats. Whether it’s analysing market trends, property values, or rental yields, Excel has you covered.
For graduates and professionals looking to enhance their Excel skills, here are some tips to get started:
- Master the basics: begin by familiarising yourself with the basic functionalities of Excel such as data entry, formatting, and basic formulas.
- Learn key formula and functions: Excel has over 500 pre-defined functions to choose from, and even has some specifically tailored to real estate modelling. Focus on learning key functions such as SUM, IF, AND, and financial functions like NPV and IRR.
- Utilise graphs: a picture conveys 1,000 words – and the same is true of a graph. Throwing in a graph showing how your awesome asset management increases the property’s value over the hold period, and your stakeholder will be putty in your hands.
- Practice and try new things: we cannot tell you how satisfying it is when you get something awesome to happen in Excel. It’s like… well, you know what it’s like. Keep practising to reinforce your learning.
By investing time and effort into mastering Excel, you can unlock a world of opportunities. Whether you’re valuing properties, analysing investment opportunities, or presenting findings to clients, Excel proficiency will set you apart, paying you dividends throughout your career.