Foundations of Real Estate Financial Modelling 2nd Edition

A few years ago, I purchased the first edition, and recently purchased the 2nd edition. After having gone through one of the top Real Estate Programs in the country, I found that students still feel "weak" when it comes to modeling. While real estate modeling is part science / part art, I feel that Staiger's book gave me a strong foundation from which to develop my art. It gave me a firm understanding of the underlying principles, from which I can build on. The second best part of the book are the discussions on pGain, stochastic modeling, and interest rate derivatives. There is no other resource like it out there, and I would highly recommend it for students who want to stand out from the pack, by turning their modeling weakness into a strength. Staiger walks you step by step, formula, by formula into constructing a solid real estate prof forma. Through practice, I've been able to speed up my progress and flawlessly model transactions. I strongly recommend this book for real estate students and professionals.

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The book provides step by step instruction on how to build a clean but powerful model. I wish my professor would have used this book in class. I am pleased with my purchase and continue to use it as a reference.

The book introduces the concept of the probability of gain (p(gain)) early on in the first few chapters and the concept of asset valuation after that. In the other chapters, the author discusses modeling of specific real estate assets. Overall, the book is okay as a reference but the choice of words by the author often leads to some confusion in my opinion.

This book showed a lot of promise and was the essence of what I was looking for. Unfortunately, even though Roger states people worked tirelessly editing the book, there are many errors. I am able to catch these errors but it knocks the books credibility. I was shocked because it seemed like no one had checked the math on examples and practice problems. The worst part of these mistakes is that they are sloppy, which makes it seem like the book was quickly published solely to become an extra source of passive income (However why would Roger need that??), instead of being published to become an academic resource and the "ideal textbook for a Real Estate Finance class".

This goes well with Roger's class. He runs through each spreadsheet at a rapid pace, so this builds the back story. The book did it all.

Great book, thanks Roger

Excel examples are very useful