Design Principles

This library will develop based on the following Design principles:

1 Prioritising Lambda for Abstraction

Using Lambda for abstraction simply means that instead of resorting to the most Excel technical end-user language (like pre-made formulae names such as IF(SUM(OR(XLOOP, etc... end-users prefer natural language like 'TenantIncome'.

2 Abbreviating with Dynamic Arrays

All users prefer to enter both inputs and calculations once. Most CRECFModels are concerned with multiple calculations of the same type. E.g. while a tenant income row may be modelled under different date timings (e.g. Jan, Feb, etc), many of these calculations can be deemed to be of ONE TYPE regardless of Timing variable inputs.

3 Championing simple construction

Creating institutional models takes a long time under 1990s and 2000s techniques. In effect, up until Lockdown (2021/2022) the working population from Graduates to Managing Directors has not been exposed to the newly-released powers of Excel. This is partly down to training, corporate focus on continued professional development, but also the major fact that these recent developments are only available within new subscription model features in Office365 or indeed not released until a few weeks ago to the General population of users.

The simpler the construction, the easier people will be able to absorb the principles of #1 and #2. And given the natural arbitrariness of end-user design preference for Commercial Real Estate Cash Flow Models, simple construction needs to offer an indisputable proposition to save time for both immediate deal analysis and ease of auditing.

The hypothesis is that the fully-fledged programming capacity of Excel (i.e. without hiding in the background of VBA or scripting - but accessible to everyone on the spreadsheet grid) now offers us the opportunity to hone in on clear, efficient methods. With greater power of Excel, one hypothesis is that the debate of efficient end-user CRE CF Modelling can be narrowed down to a reasonable discussion of proposals and counter proposals, depending on one's priorities. The resulting answers should be so compelling, that they appeal to all CRE users to be adopted quickly. And most importantly can be easily reviewed to review, critique, strengthen or cancel in favour of safer, robust and far safer methods.

Timings

The most common feature in a Commercial Real Estate ('CRE') Cash Flow ('CF') Model ('CRECFModel') appears to be time horizons. They appear in Annual, Quarterly, Monthly summaries, CAPEX project workings, tenancy rent calculations, debt modelling, etc. After all investment metrics are heavily concerned with the Time Value of Money theory.