I founded Assetti back in October 2013. In nearly 13 years, I have worked through hundreds of rent rolls and income statements. And in all that time, one problem keeps coming back — every single time.
How do you forecast the financial performance of a real estate portfolio without it becoming a full-time job?
The honest answer is that there are no shortcuts. And the reasons why are well understood.
Income has to be forecasted through the current and future lease and space inventory — in other words, through the rent roll. You can work with actual contracted rents and space data, or with ERVs (Estimated Rental Values), and model in vacancy and related deductions. Either way, the rent roll is your starting point.
Operating costs can be extrapolated from accounting records, since actuals and benchmark data are widely available. The logic is also broadly shared across the industry. Property managers and building supervisors typically know their assets and local cost levels well — so this part, while tedious, is at least tractable.
Capex is where things get murky. Even when detailed, carefully prepared long-term maintenance plans (LTMP alternatively Capex plan) exist, they are typically buried inside PDF reports and separate Excel files — and have to be manually extracted, line by line, into the forecast. On top of that, decisions about major individual projects shift easily from one year to the next as a property is prepared for sale, or a portfolio needs to be valued for refinancing purposes.
Even when dedicated software exists for Building Maintenance management, the data is not automatically carried over into the financial forecast. Human judgment fills the gap — every time.
The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of real estate financial forecasting is still done by hand in Excel. The manual workload is enormous, and at worst, the errors are fatal.
The core dilemma of forecasting can be framed as a single question: do you forecast through spaces (the rent roll) or through accounts (the general ledger)?
The correct answer is both. And that is precisely what has been missing.
We have solved — for the first time in the industry, to our knowledge — the challenge of combining rental income forecasting with operating costs and capital expenditure in a single, unified view.
Within the same visual interface, you can:
The goal is to remove 80–90% of the manual workload from forecasting — and in doing so, meaningfully improve both quality and accuracy.
If eliminating most of the manual effort from your forecasting process sounds interesting, we would love to show you more.
Join the waiting list — and be among the first to hear about new releases. You will also have the opportunity to influence the direction of future versions.
