# Real Estate Appraisal: companion files

By Julian R. Sterling. These files are served at julianrsterling.com/appraisal. No sign-up, no email is asked for.

The workbooks follow one fictional property, Kestrel Park Apartments, 72 units in the Westlake submarket of Auberon, an invented American metropolitan area, appraised for the buyer's lender as of January 12, 2026 and sold under a contract at $12,850,000 against an appraised value of $12,100,000. A second, residential case (41 Linden Grove) carries the classic sales grid. Every property, party, comparable sale and figure is fictional. Rents, costs, cap rates and absorption are the book's assumptions, not market statistics. Nothing here is appraisal, investment, legal or tax advice, and none of it is an appraisal of any property.

## What is in the pack

| File | What it is | Where in the book |
|---|---|---|
| `Appraisal_Income_Approach.xlsx` | The rent roll and rent comparables, the market analysis (deliveries, demand, the vacancy path and the rent growth rule), the owner's, the appraiser's and the buyer's operating statements, the cap rate three ways, direct capitalization with its sensitivities, the ten-year DCF, the loan sizing and the construction loan, and the five review errors quantified. | Chapters 4 to 8, 18 and 19 |
| `Appraisal_Sales_and_Cost.xlsx` | The five improved sales, the three paired sales, the full adjustment grid, the four land sales, cost new, the three kinds of depreciation, market-extracted depreciation, the highest and best use tests. | Chapters 3, 9, 10 and 11 |
| `Appraisal_Reconciliation_and_Bridge.xlsx` | The reconciliation of the three indications, the contract price, the bridge from value to price component by component (concession, assumed loan, date lag, cost structure, information, portfolio, exchange, motivation, residual), the exchange tax, the buyer's investment value DCF, the partial interest, the hotel split, the rules cited. | Chapters 12 to 17 and 21 |
| `Residential_Grid_and_ROV.xlsx` | The house, its three comparables and the reconsideration comparable, the grid, the paired sales behind it, the appraisal gap and the loan before and after the revised opinion. | Chapter 20 |
| `Appraisal_Review_Checklist.xlsx` | The reviewer's checklist as a working sheet: about sixty items in nine groups, a Yes, No or NA cell for each, and a count of what has been answered. | Chapter 19 and Appendix B |
| `Blank_Appraisal_Templates.xlsx` | Four working sheets with every input empty: an operating statement and direct capitalization, a five-comparable adjustment grid, a cost approach, and a value-to-price bridge. | Chapters 5, 7, 9, 11 and 16 |
| `Appraisal_60_Minute_Test.xlsx` | A separate, simpler case to work against the clock: build the fifteen answers, then open the Score sheet and the Answer Key. | The whole book |

## Recommended order

1. Open `Appraisal_Reconciliation_and_Bridge.xlsx` and read the Price_and_Bridge sheet: the value is $12,100,000, the price $12,850,000, the gap $750,000 (6.2 percent of value), and the residual once the eight components are taken out is $45,906 (0.38 percent of value).
2. Go back to `Appraisal_Income_Approach.xlsx` for Part II's income chapters, then `Appraisal_Sales_and_Cost.xlsx` for the grid and the cost approach.
3. Take the 60-minute test once you have read Part II.
4. Use `Blank_Appraisal_Templates.xlsx` and the checklist on your own reports. Save a copy first.

## Working rules

- Yellow cells with blue type are inputs; grey cells are formulas. Change an input and every figure that depends on it moves.
- Each worked workbook ends with a Checks sheet that sets every figure the book prints beside the live cell that computes it, with the numeric difference and a tolerance of half a unit of the last printed digit. The overall status reads PASS only if every check passes; an error counts as a failure. Read the difference, not only the word.
- Cap rates are applied to NOI on the appraiser's basis (market management fee, replacement reserves). The book explains why a broker's cap rate on a broker's NOI is a different number.
- No macros, no circular references, no external links, nothing hidden or locked. The files recalculate in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets.

Julian R. Sterling, julianrsterling.com/appraisal