These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Real Estate VBA Project - KSL

Executive Summary
The Business Overview
Durrant Property Investments (DPI) is my father’s company and has been in existence for approximately 22 years.  DPI’s core business model is to invest in real estate in the Provo, UT area, specifically in single family homes and apartment complexes.  These properties are then rented out to BYU and UVU students.  DPI has employed students for years to help manage the properties, collect rent, perform cleaning checks, and upkeep the landscaping of the homes and complexes.
            For years DPI has found deals through building relationships with other real estate professionals in the community.  However, a wide variety of past deals have come from scouring the newspaper, searching for “For Sale” signs, and using the internet.  This last option is the one that is the most efficient, has the greatest amount of information, and is the best way to scan a lot of potential investments anytime and anywhere.  The problem is that it is both time consuming and difficult to first narrow down the options to those homes that meet your requirements and then to open each link to see if the homes meet your criteria.  It is also annoying because many of these properties have been posted multiple times.  It is like trying to find a needle in the haystack.
The System Overview
            My project solves these problems directly, providing a fast, organized, and painless way to rip all of the home data off KSL and then analyze all of the listed properties to find the best deals.  Using a UserForm, that takes the 15 different parameters to create the right URL to find all of the homes that meet the criteria.  The web scraper then opens every link of all the property listings on every single page.  For each of the specific properties, my tool scrapes off the address, price, property type, seller type, bedrooms, bathrooms, year built, square footage, acreage, garage information, basement information, and the description!

            The system then pastes all of the information into the “Home Data” tab with hyperlinks to all of the KSL listings.  After pasting all of the information for the homes that passed the initial filter, they are then sorted and analyzed on the “Dashboard” tab.  Using conditional formatting the top five cheapest homes by price per square foot are highlighted in green.  These top 5 homes are also ranked by price per acre and the conditional formatting of a green checkmark, yellow exclamation point, or red x are shown next to the price/acre, indicating the best deals.  Lastly, if the home is being sold by the owner, the last cell in each of the top rows is highlighted in blue to indicate that there is potential to negotiate a lower price due to the fact that there are no agent commissions for the seller.

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