Projecting future expenses
How do you all model forward year expenses, given historical expenses and expense comps?
For example, suppose I have the 2017-2019 expenses for an office building, and I also have a few good recent expense comps. What method would you use for estimating the expenses for the forward year?
Obviously tax expense is just going to be based on the current tax rate and assessed value.
I was thinking of simply taking the average of the historical expenses, and then comparing with expense comps to test for reasonability. It can get a bit tricky because some individual expenses may have more of a clear upward/downward trend than others.
Is it uncommon to incorporate any kind of trend-line analysis into the modeling for this?
I'd like to hear how you typically approach this.
Thanks for any input!
I mean you can use trendline, but I wouldn't...not if you want the deal to pencil.
Tax analysis should have its own tab.
Insurance should be like 5% esacllation, but everything else, you are right should jsut be 3%. Also, depends on the lease-up of the building.
Yep I'm doing a separate tab for the tax analysis.
So you're saying to just do a straight 3% escalation from the previous year (2019 in this case), and not consider 2017-2018 expenses?
correct.
If you want to go that method then you can run a statistical analysis for the previous 5-10 years increases.
But, it is real estate.
accidental, ignore this comment
I would add to what has been said.....
Consider expense growth and rent growth (if any) jointly. If you a projecting rent growth on the top line (or market rents, for rollover/release) of say 2.5%, then expense growth should be near the same if not more, unless you have some strong reason to justify otherwise.
In reality, it is usually the CAPX that surprises and causes issues, OpEX not quite has as bad. That is why I am considered with the any growth in NOI due to a growing 'spread' between rents and OpEX, can lead to an overstated NOI that gets cap'd for terminal value. The impact on annual CF may be minimal by comparison.
So you're saying that in doing a DCF, if you don't use the same % increase for OpEx and Rent growth, the spread grows and your NOI for the final year is too high, which makes the terminal value way too high?
For my purposes I'm actually just doing a direct capitalization based on a single years projected cash flows, so I don't think that problem would arise for what I'm doing, but yes I agree with you
If you say make rent growth 2.5% and expense growth 2%, this will be minimal in first few years, but if doing a 10 year DCF, it will actually drive far more NOI growth than may be rational.
For direct cap on next year NOI, sure it's not going to matter much, so I would not stress but still logical.
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