Is there a free downloadable real estate pro forma template I can use?

There are dozens floating around — BiggerPockets spreadsheets, Tactica RES templates, Stessa rental tools, and broker-published Excel files. Most are residential or sub-institutional. They model a single rent stream against a flat 50% expense ratio and call it a pro forma. For a single-family rental or a small multifamily building under $5M, that's fine. For a 100-unit apartment complex or a 200,000 SF office building, those templates fall apart at the first IC question. The right answer is to build the structure — the one this guide lays out — into your own model, or to start from your firm's proprietary template if you're at an institutional shop.

What fields should a commercial real estate pro forma template contain?

Five sections, each with their own tabs in most institutional models. Revenue: base rent by tenant, vacancy, free rent, expense recoveries, percentage rent, other income, EGI. Operating expenses: real estate taxes, insurance, utilities, repairs, payroll, contract services, management fee, G&A, total OpEx, and the recoverable-vs-non-recoverable split. NOI line. Capital: tenant improvements, leasing commissions, capital reserves, non-recurring capex. Financing: debt service, refinance assumptions, DSCR, debt yield. Terminal: year N+1 NOI, exit cap rate, selling costs, net sale proceeds. Plus assumptions tabs, sensitivity tables, and a returns summary.

What's the difference between a rental property pro forma template and a commercial one?

A rental property template usually models one or a small number of residential units against a flat operating-expense ratio (the 50% rule). A commercial template models each tenant on the rent roll separately, with their own escalation schedule, recovery treatment, free rent, options, and capital. The commercial template also splits operating expenses into recoverable and non-recoverable, tracks tenant improvements and leasing commissions on every rollover, and runs DSCR and debt yield on a year-by-year basis. The rental template is sufficient for napkin-math screening. The commercial template is required for institutional underwriting.

Should I build my own pro forma template or use an existing one?

If you're at an institutional shop — Blackstone, KKR, Brookfield, Nuveen, Starwood, a major REIT, a CRE lender's credit team — you already have one. Most large shops have a proprietary template that's been refined over years and reflects how the team thinks about the asset class. If you're at a smaller sponsor or an emerging manager, the right move is to build your own from the structure in this guide rather than start from a free download, because the free downloads encode someone else's assumptions about line items, expense ratios, and reserves that may not match your investment strategy.

Why do most real estate pro forma templates online look the same?

Because they were mostly written for residential or sub-institutional investors, often by content marketers or course creators, and they copy each other. The same 50% rule shows up. The same 1% screening rule. The same flat 3% rent growth and 2.5% expense inflation. The same single-tab Excel structure with a depreciation schedule that has nothing to do with CRE underwriting. They look the same because they were built for the same audience — retail investors buying single-family rentals — and they don't translate to commercial deals. The honest answer is most online templates are calibrated for a market the institutional buyer doesn't operate in.

Does Argus replace the need for a pro forma template?

Argus replaces the lease-by-lease DCF modeling. It doesn't replace the wrap-around analysis — sources and uses, the capital stack, the equity waterfall, sensitivity tables, IRR distributions, comparable-trade analysis, and the IC summary page. Most institutional shops run Argus for the cash-flow build and an Excel template for everything around it. The Argus output gets pasted into the Excel template, which then produces the returns and the IC-ready exhibits. The template still exists. Its scope just shrinks.

Real Estate Pro Forma Template: The Institutional CRE Spec

If you search “real estate pro forma template” you’ll find a few dozen downloadable Excel files. I’ve looked at most of them over the years. They have one thing in common: almost none of them are built for the kind of deal an institutional acquisitions team actually underwrites.

I spent ten years on the buy side at Stockbridge Capital, the last five as Director of Research, and closed over $2B in commercial real estate. Every one of those deals ran through some version of a pro forma template — ours, our lender’s, the appraiser’s, the broker’s. None of them looked like the free downloads. The free downloads are mostly residential. Where they’re commercial, they’re oversimplified. And almost universally they encode assumptions — flat 50% expense ratios, 1% rules, single-stream rent — that don’t survive contact with a real deal.

So this guide is the honest version. Not a downloadable file. The structure that an institutional pro forma template actually contains, field by field, with notes on what each field is for and where the residential templates fall short. If you want to build your own, this is the spec. If you want the worked example with numbers, read the commercial real estate pro forma guide.

Why most online templates don’t work for CRE

Three structural problems with the templates floating around:

1. They were written for residential. The 50% rule, the 1% rule, the single-unit vacancy assumption — these are residential rules of thumb. Commercial leases don’t work like that. A triple-net retail tenant pays their share of taxes, insurance, and CAM directly. A modified-gross office tenant pays escalations over a base year. A full-service-gross tenant pays nothing. Lumping these into one expense ratio loses the information that drives the deal.

2. They model one rent stream. Most templates have a single line for “rental income” times a growth rate. Commercial pro formas have to model each tenant. A 125,000 SF office building with four tenants and four different lease structures cannot be modeled as one rent stream growing at 3%. The income profile is lumpy, the rollovers happen on different dates, and the free-rent and TI hits don’t synchronize.

3. They don’t track capital correctly. Most templates roll capex into a single reserve line. Commercial pro formas have to track tenant improvements, leasing commissions, capital reserves, and non-recurring capex separately, because each has different drivers and different timing. Lumping them together hides the year-3 cash flow valley that re-tenanting causes.

The result is that the typical free template produces a smooth, optimistic cash flow that looks great in a deck and falls apart the moment a lender or an IC committee asks about lease-by-lease assumptions.

The structure of an institutional CRE pro forma template

A proper institutional template is multi-tab. The core tabs are:

Assumptions — every input the model uses, in one place
Rent roll — tenant-by-tenant lease detail
Operating pro forma — multi-year cash flow
Capital schedule — TI, LC, reserves, non-recurring
Debt schedule — loan terms, amortization, refinance assumptions
Returns summary — IRR, equity multiple, NPV, DSCR
Sensitivity tables — IRR / multiple at varying exit caps, rent growth, vacancy
Sources & uses — equity and debt funding the acquisition

Each tab pulls from the assumptions tab. Hard-coded inputs anywhere else in the model are a code smell. Below is the field-level inventory for each tab.

Tab 1: Assumptions

This is the single tab where every input lives. Everything else in the model references this tab. The discipline of forcing every assumption into one place is the difference between a model your IC can audit and a model that hides its own logic.

Fields:

Property name, address, asset class, year built, year renovated
Net rentable area (SF or units)
Acquisition date, purchase price, closing costs (typically 1.5-2.5% of price)
Hold period (years)
Market rent assumptions — by asset class, by space type, in dollars per SF or per unit per year
Market rent growth — year-by-year or a single annual rate
Vacancy and credit loss assumptions — by tenant type if applicable
Expense growth rate — usually 2.5-3.0%, sometimes split by line item
Real estate tax reassessment factor — local jurisdiction-specific
Insurance growth or step-up — explicit if market is repricing
Management fee percentage
Capital reserve per SF or per unit
Tenant improvement assumptions — per SF for new tenants, per SF for renewals, by space type
Leasing commission assumptions — percentage of total lease value or flat per SF
Renewal probability — typically 65-75% for office, 80-85% for industrial
Downtime assumption — months of vacancy between leases
Free rent assumption — months granted on new leases
Exit cap rate — going-in plus 25-75 bps
Selling costs — typically 2-3% of gross sale price
Debt assumptions — LTV, interest rate, amortization, IO period, refinance year
Discount rate / target IRR

Every one of these should be a single cell, named and labeled. Templates that scatter assumptions across the model — a tax growth rate hard-coded in the operating tab, a vacancy assumption hard-coded in the rent roll — are unauditable.

Tab 2: Rent roll

This is the lease-by-lease build. Every tenant on the property gets a row. Columns:

Tenant name
Suite or unit number
Rentable square footage (or unit count for multifamily)
Lease type — triple net (NNN), modified gross (MG), full-service gross (FSG), absolute net
Commencement date
Expiration date
Remaining term (years)
Current base rent (PSF or per unit, annual)
Current monthly rent
Contractual escalation schedule — fixed percentage, CPI-indexed, fixed dollar bumps
Step-rent table — explicit dollar amounts by year if applicable
Free rent remaining — months
Recovery treatment — base year, full pass-through, pro-rata share, CAM cap
Pro-rata share — typically tenant SF / total building SF
Expense base year — for modified-gross leases
Percentage rent — breakpoint, percentage, sales reporting
Renewal options — number, length, rent at renewal (fixed, FMV, FMV with floor)
Termination options — date, notice period, termination fee
Co-tenancy provisions — named anchors, kickout triggers
Exclusive use provisions — restriction language
Security deposit amount
Tenant credit / parent guarantee — yes/no, S&P or Moody’s rating if applicable
Lease document references — original lease date, amendment dates

This is the tab Argus replaces. If you’re using Argus, the rent roll lives there. If you’re using Excel, this tab feeds every revenue line in the operating pro forma.

The residential templates condense this into “average rent” and “average vacancy.” That’s where the model breaks.

Tab 3: Operating pro forma

The multi-year cash flow. Columns are years (typically 1 through 10 or 1 through 11 with year 11 being the reversion year). Rows:

Revenue

Gross potential rent (sum of every tenant’s contractual rent for the year)
Adjustment for vacancy and credit loss
Free rent (negative)
Absorption and turnover vacancy (negative)
Expense recoveries (from tenants on NNN or MG leases)
Percentage rent (if applicable)
Other income (parking, signage, storage, etc.)
Effective gross income (EGI)

Operating expenses

Real estate taxes
Insurance
Utilities
Repairs and maintenance
Payroll
Contract services
Marketing
General and administrative
Management fee (as percentage of EGI)
Total operating expenses

NOI

Net operating income = EGI minus Total OpEx

Capital (below the NOI line)

Tenant improvements
Leasing commissions
Capital reserves
Non-recurring capex
Total capital

Cash flow

Unlevered cash flow = NOI minus Total capital
Debt service (interest plus principal)
Levered cash flow before refinance/exit

Reversion year

Year N+1 NOI
Exit cap rate
Gross sale value
Selling costs
Net sale proceeds

The institutional discipline is that each line item is calculated from the assumptions tab and the rent roll, not hard-coded.

Tab 4: Capital schedule

A separate tab that drives the capital lines on the operating pro forma. For each tenant rollover:

Tenant name
Lease expiration date
Square footage rolling
Renewal probability
Downtime if not renewed
TI per SF (new) and TI per SF (renewal)
LC per SF (new) and LC per SF (renewal)
Total TI dollars (probability-weighted)
Total LC dollars (probability-weighted)
Free rent months
Year the capital hits

Plus a non-recurring capex section listing specific projects — roof replacement year 3, mechanical upgrade year 5, parking lot resurfacing year 4 — with the dollar amount and the year it hits.

This is the tab that captures the lumpiness commercial pro formas have. Residential templates have no analog.

Tab 5: Debt schedule

The loan-by-loan amortization. For each tranche of debt:

Loan amount
Origination date
Interest rate (fixed or floating, with spread and index)
Interest-only period
Amortization period (typically 30 years even on shorter-term loans)
Maturity date
Prepayment penalty structure
Year-by-year balance, interest, principal, debt service
DSCR by year (NOI / debt service)
Debt yield by year (NOI / loan balance)

If a refinance is contemplated mid-hold, model the new loan on the same tab.

Tab 6: Returns summary

The IC-facing tab. Pulls from the operating pro forma and debt schedule.

Unlevered IRR
Unlevered equity multiple
Levered IRR
Levered equity multiple
Unlevered net present value at target discount rate
Going-in cap rate
Stabilized cap rate (year 3 or 5)
Exit cap rate
Yield on cost (for value-add or development)
Year-by-year DSCR
Year-by-year debt yield
Cash-on-cash return by year (levered)
Average cash-on-cash return
Peak equity contribution

This is the page that gets stapled to the IC memo.

Tab 7: Sensitivity tables

Two-variable data tables showing IRR (or equity multiple) at varying combinations of:

Exit cap rate vs. rent growth
Vacancy vs. rent growth
Purchase price vs. exit cap
Hold period vs. exit cap
Refinance year vs. refinance rate

These are the tables that IC actually reads. The base-case IRR is one number. The sensitivity tables tell IC where the deal is fragile.

Tab 8: Sources & uses

For acquisitions:

Purchase price
Closing costs
Acquisition fee
Working capital reserve
Total uses

Funded by:

Senior debt
Mezzanine debt (if applicable)
Preferred equity (if applicable)
Common equity (LP and GP)
Total sources

For development pro formas, sources and uses is significantly more involved — it covers the construction draw schedule, capitalized interest, contingency, and the take-out at stabilization.

What the residential templates miss

If you compare the field inventory above to a typical “rental property pro forma template” or “real estate development pro forma template excel free” download, the differences are stark:

No lease-by-lease build
No recoverable-vs-non-recoverable expense split
No tenant improvement modeling
No leasing commission modeling
No co-tenancy, exclusivity, or termination option fields
No DSCR or debt yield by year
No exit cap decompression
No sensitivity tables
No sources and uses for the capital stack

What’s there is a single rent stream, a flat 50% expense ratio, a linear growth assumption, and a depreciation schedule that has nothing to do with how institutional CRE gets underwritten.

For a single-family rental or a small multifamily building, the simpler template is fine. For a $25M-$200M institutional deal, it’s not a template — it’s a sketch.

The honest answer on templates

A few practical notes for anyone trying to use this guide:

If you’re at an institutional shop, you already have a template. Blackstone has one. KKR has one. Brookfield has one. Nuveen has one. Every PE shop, REIT, and CRE lender has a proprietary template refined over years and tuned to how that team thinks. The structure above is what they all have in common. Don’t replace yours with a free download.

If you’re at an emerging manager or a small sponsor, build your own. Use the structure above. Don’t start from a generic download — you’ll inherit assumptions about expense ratios, reserves, and rent growth that may not match your investment strategy. Start from the field inventory and build the template that matches how your firm thinks.

If you’re a single-asset investor, the residential templates are probably fine. The institutional structure is overkill for a duplex. Use the 50% rule for screening, the 1% rule for sanity, and a simple Excel sheet for the actual underwriting.

If you want a commercial template, look at Argus first. For office, retail, and industrial with lease-by-lease complexity, Argus Enterprise is the institutional default. The cash-flow modeling is built in; you supply the wrap-around Excel for sources, uses, waterfalls, and IC summary.

Where Atlas fits

The template is downstream. The harder problem is the inputs.

A typical commercial pro forma takes two to three days of analyst time to populate before any modeling actually happens. The rent roll arrives as a PDF that has to be re-keyed. The T-12 comes out of Yardi in a chart of accounts that doesn’t match the template. Each lease has to be read and abstracted for the terms that affect the income stream. Each abstraction has to be reconciled against the rent roll and the seller’s representations.

That’s the work Atlas (DDee.ai) replaces. The platform extracts the rent roll PDF into structured data, parses the T-12 into normalized operating line items, abstracts each lease for material terms with citations back to the source document, and flags variances against the seller’s representations. The output flows directly into your template, your Argus model, or your IC memo.

The pro forma template doesn’t change. The time to populate it does.

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