My day job is with Intellect Automation International and co-founders in London and Sydney. We currently focus on making the Commercial Real Estate (‘CRE’) investment underwriting world more transparent and easy to use via an approach called MaaS! As per its Spanish-sounding equivalent, this approach is all about getting More! MaaS (aka ‘Modelling-As-A-Service’) super-charges traditional investment teams to overcome 25+ years of highly-risky and time-consuming cash flow modelling labor that takes place in the daily workplace.

Morgan Stanley: “Everything is a DCF” (‘Discounted Cash Flow’)

As Morgan Stanley says: “Everthing is a DCF”… if you want to communicate and explicitly explain to fellow human beings how investment scenarios may achieve a range of returns, there is no better way than DCF modelling. In the field of Commercial Real Estate investment, there are over 2,000 deals a year in the UK alone that demand thousands of professionals to manually run and butcher DCF templates by hand. The question here is how can technology and modern techniques help us find paths to produce DCFs ever more easily?

Every Analyst Team has Coders

Many don’t realise they’ve always been “coders” to some degree…. each time they open and work on an investment scenario in Excel.

Argh – why spreadsheets?!

There are many reasons why, often to the chagrin of tech enthusiasts, corporates fall back on the world of trusty modelling in spreadsheets. But just like the ubiquitous TV screen, there is a growing ecosystem of digital boxes, powerful game consoles and all sorts of nifty gadgets that keep the TV (i.e. the Excel in this analogy) modern, relevant and highly unlikely to be dropped by institutions that require its visual and instant numerical results.

Tech is marching forward

One of my main projects during my day job is Dashflow for CRE (`Commercial Real Estate``), which is just one piece of an expanding ecosystem to make cash flow modelling life easier. It has a symbiotic relationship with Excel, as do many other solutions. And it is clear that this field is growing at a dramatically faster rate than 2019 – and there are a myriad of cultural and techie reasons explored on this Bricks & Cells site.

Modern financial skills for success

It’s no mean task to track relevant developments that affect modern-day financial analysis capabilities. But there is no doubt that a modern analyst must embrace diverse and multi-disciplinary skills to thrive and succeed. Tech and AI is moving and evolving faster than ever before in history. Placemaking and urban environment deals are becoming more complicated. Competition, institutional capital allocations and investor sophistication is only intensifying.

Hence why this multi-disciplinary challenge overspills into this Bricks & Cells repository:

While much of this site started as random bookmarks buried away in one internet browser or another, or one old notebook after another, this site serves as a repository and reference to explore this rich subject: the intersection between institutional investors and DCF-related tech progress. The resources, free examples and samples on this site keep track of developments that can have an impact on the institutional discipline of cash flow modelling. Feedback and comments are invited.

Your feedback and comments are warmly welcomed whether you are a commercial real estate fund manager, coder, academic or from any other DCF-relatable interest. If there is an angle you think is missing, don’t hesitate to get in touch!