Office Lease Options Appraisal Model – Excel XLSX

REAL ESTATE EXCEL DESCRIPTION

Office Lease Options Appraisal Model is an Excel template (XLSX) with a supplemental Zip archive file document available for immediate download upon purchase.

Stop comparing office leases on rent. Start deciding on true occupancy cost.
A decision model built to the conventions a board paper has to survive.

THE PROBLEM

When your lease expires, your broker will present a comparison of options ranked by "Net Effective Rent per square foot". That metric is designed for negotiations, not for business decisions. It ignores a third to a half of your true occupancy costs – business rates, service charges, dilapidations. It hides the cash-flow impact of a fit-out. Most dangerously, it ranks every option, even the ones that cannot physically seat your projected headcount or be delivered before your deadline.

THE SOLUTION

This Excel model takes a gates-first, cost-second approach.

It establishes your requirement: desks, area, time and capital.

It gates the options: any option that fails capacity, lead time, capital or commitment is flagged, with the margin stated and what would have to change for it to pass.

It prices the survivors: on total occupancy cost per head, the only metric that holds up when options differ in size, density and term.

KEY FEATURES

The 360-degree cost pool. Rent, service charge, property taxes and rates, utilities, out-of-hours air conditioning, FM contracts, insurance, parking, dilapidations, dual running, technical migration.

Flexible against traditional, levelled. All-inclusive monthly desk rates and traditional leased space on one comparison, with the implied density of each reported against your own space standard.

Gross-to-net conversion built in. Enter the area as the lease states it and the building's efficiency ratio alongside; the model derives the net area for every comparison and carries the ratio to the summary.

The minus twenty per cent stress test. One switch re-runs every gate and every cost on a low headcount scenario.

Run-rate against Year 1 cash. The stabilised annual cost and the first-year funding requirement reported separately, because a rent-free period distorts one and not the other.

Blank cost flags. Unanswered cost lines are estimated from your current building rather than treated as nil, so an option nobody has fully quoted looks dearer, not cheaper.

WHERE THIS MODEL IS WEAKEST

Stated here rather than discovered later.

North American leases. Operating expenses are commonly passed through as escalations above a base year, compounding from nil. The workbook carries a recurring cost and inflates it, which is a different shape. For a New York option, calculate the escalation year by year and enter the result; the guide explains how. Every other market is handled natively.

No lease accounting. It produces no right-of-use asset, no lease liability and no straight-lined charge. It answers what an option costs and whether it can be delivered, not how it will be reported.

Partial surrenders need splitting by hand. The dilapidations trigger carries one figure. Where you hand back part of a floor and keep the rest, you split the liability yourself and record how.

WHAT YOU GET

The primary document is a fully populated London worked example, so you can see every output before you buy – the four gates, the reasons an option failed, the cost comparison for the ones that passed, and the one-page summary as it would go to a board.

The secondary download is a ZIP containing three files.

The blank template. This is the one you fill in: 1,056 formulas, explicit blank-input handling, no hidden error suppression. Defaults, drivers, the lead-time ladder and every guidance note are kept; only the illustrative figures are cleared.

A 25-page user guide in English, and the same guide in Traditional Chinese. Not a software manual – an anti-ambush guide for finance directors, covering the four most expensive mistakes in a lease appraisal: VAT basis mismatches, transaction tax traps, run-rate against first-year cash, and what "all-inclusive" excludes in a flexible office. The Chinese edition is localised rather than translated: the VAT chapter is short, the Hong Kong market section is considerably longer.

Source: Best Practices in Real Estate, Integrated Financial Model Excel: Office Lease Options Appraisal Model Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, Chargeable Area