Crevanta vs Underwriting in Excel

Quick Summary

Excel is not the competition anyone likes to name, and it is the tool almost every deal is still priced in. It deserves a fair comparison rather than a strawman: a good analyst with a good template is fast, flexible and completely in control of their own assumptions.

What a spreadsheet cannot do is read the documents. Every figure in that model arrived because someone typed it, and that is where both the hours and the errors live.

What Excel Genuinely Does Better

Worth stating plainly, because a comparison that pretends otherwise is not useful:

• Total flexibility. Any structure, any waterfall, any one-off assumption a deal happens to need. No software models every deal shape, and a spreadsheet models all of them.
• Universality. Every counterparty, lender and partner can open it. No access to provision, no seat to buy, no export step.
• Complete transparency. Every formula is visible. A reviewer who wants to know where a number came from can trace it — assuming the model is clean.
• No adoption cost. The team already knows it.

Any tool that cannot beat those on the things that matter is not worth switching to.

Where It Breaks

The data entry, which is most of the work. Pulling a rent roll into a unit mix, coding a T-12 into standard heads, keying comparables — this is the bulk of the hours in a first pass, and none of it is analysis. It is the part a spreadsheet cannot help with, because the spreadsheet's inputs start after it.

Provenance. A cell contains 1,750. Which lease, which page, which amendment? A spreadsheet cannot answer that, so verification means going back to the source documents by hand — which is exactly why, under time pressure, it usually doesn't happen.

Version control. Model_v7_FINAL_revised_JT.xlsx is a joke because it is universal. When two people have opinions about the exit cap, there are two files, and the question of which is current has no technical answer.

Consistency across deals. Two analysts using the same template will still code operating expenses differently, take vacancy on different bases, and define gross potential rent differently. That makes deals incomparable in a portfolio view, and the differences are invisible because both models are internally consistent.

The silent arithmetic errors. The loss-to-lease and vacancy interaction is the clearest example: charge vacancy on gross potential rent rather than on scheduled rent and you deduct the same below-market gap twice. The model still balances, still ties, still looks right. On a 100-unit property with an 8% loss to lease it quietly writes off roughly $196,000 of value at a 5.5% cap.

Side by Side

The three rows where Excel wins are real and are not going away. The honest framing is not replacement but division of labour: the document reading, coding and reconciliation are mechanical and should be automated; the judgement about what the deal is worth stays with the analyst.

When to Stay in Excel

• One-off structures. An unusual JV waterfall, a ground lease with bespoke participation, a development deal with a capital stack nobody models generically.
• Very low volume. If you underwrite a handful of deals a year, the setup cost of anything is hard to justify.
• A model that is already an asset. Some firms have templates refined over a decade that encode genuine institutional knowledge. That is worth keeping.

When the Spreadsheet Is the Bottleneck

• Deal volume has outgrown the analyst. When the constraint on how many deals you can look at is typing speed, the typing is the problem.
• Nobody can verify a number quickly. If confirming an in-place rent means opening a lease PDF and searching it, verification stops happening.
• Portfolio questions cannot be answered. "What is our weighted loss to lease across the book?" requires every model to define loss to lease the same way.
• The rent roll is a snapshot nobody dated. Every lease analytic is measured from the roll's as-of date. A spreadsheet rarely records it, so WALT and expirations are measured from whenever the formula happened to run.

What Actually Changes

The model still needs an underwriter. What changes is where the hours go: less time assembling the inputs, more time on the assumptions that decide the answer. And the outputs become comparable across deals, because the definitions are the same by construction rather than by everyone remembering to use the same template.

The realistic posture is that Excel remains in the workflow — for the odd structure, for the export a lender wants, for the scratch analysis. What it stops being is the place the underlying data is keyed in by hand.

Sources

• Institute of Real Estate Management: chart-of-accounts and operating expense reporting conventions, and the reason two hand-built models can code the same statement differently.
• CCIM Institute: the standard analytical framework for income-property valuation.
• National Apartment Association — Income & Expenses Surveys: the benchmark that portfolio comparability is measured against.