Case study / Residential Development
Development Appraisals Dashboard: From Standalone Excel to Portfolio Intelligence
Background
Excel appraisals. Portfolio-level decisions. No way to connect the two.
For a leading housebuilder, development appraisals are the foundation of every investment decision. Each appraisal is a detailed financial model — built in Excel, maintained by the technical and commercial teams, and revised at key gateway stages from early options through to planning application and final grant. The Excel format is deliberate: it gives the teams the flexibility and control a complex financial model requires.
The challenge was not the appraisals themselves — it was the view across them. With multiple live pre-commencement developments in progress at any time, each with its own appraisal file, there was no way to see profitability, product mix and build programme across the portfolio without manually opening and comparing individual files. Decisions about which projects to prioritise, which product mixes performed best and where development costs were trending were being made without the aggregated data to support them. The business engaged Acumine to build the layer that connected the appraisals into a single, always-current portfolio view.
No portfolio view across appraisals
Each development appraisal was a standalone Excel file. Getting a picture of profitability, product mix or revenue across all live developments required opening every file individually — there was no aggregated view available without significant manual effort.
Benchmarking was effectively impossible
Comparing projects against each other — by cost per square foot, PBIT, revenue per unit or product mix — required manually extracting and aligning data from multiple files. In practice, this meant benchmarking rarely happened in a structured, data-driven way.
Appraisals updated at different cadences
Each appraisal was revised at its own pace — as gateway stages progressed and assumptions were updated. With no central view, leadership had no reliable way to know whether they were looking at the latest version of each appraisal or an earlier draft.
Cross-functional teams all needed the same insight
Technical, sales, finance, commercial, construction and leadership all had a stake in appraisal data — but each function was drawing its own conclusions from its own view of individual files. A shared, consistent dashboard was needed to support joined-up decision-making across the business.
What development appraisals contain
Detailed financial models — rich with data that was locked in individual files.
Each development appraisal is a structured Excel model capturing the full financial picture of a proposed development — from unit mix and build costs through to revenue, profitability and gateway progression. The data was already there. The challenge was making it accessible across the portfolio.
Product mix and unit composition
What is being built and in what proportions
Each appraisal captures the breakdown of unit types — houses, apartments, duplexes — by bedroom count and sales category, including private, Part V and PRS units. Understanding product mix across the portfolio is fundamental to commercial strategy but required cross-file analysis to see.
Revenue and profitability
Gross revenue, net revenue and PBIT by development
Appraisals hold detailed revenue and cost projections including gross and net revenue, average sales prices, build cost per square foot, development costs per unit and PBIT. Benchmarking these metrics across developments — to see which projects and product mixes delivered the strongest returns — required a reporting layer to aggregate and compare them.
Build programme and gateway stage
Units to be delivered per year and where each project sits
Each appraisal records the forecasted number of units to be built per year and the current gateway stage — from early Options and Master Plan through to Planning Application and Final Grant. Tracking pipeline volume and gateway progression across all live developments in one view was not possible without an aggregation platform.
The solution
A live dashboard that reads every appraisal automatically — daily
Acumine built a Microsoft Fabric and Power BI dashboard that ingests all live pre-commencement development appraisals on a daily basis — transforming a collection of individual Excel files into a single, interactive portfolio intelligence platform. The Excel appraisal process itself was unchanged: teams continued to update their models as normal, and the dashboard reflected the latest version of every appraisal automatically each day.
The dashboard was designed to be genuinely interactive — clickable visualisations filter the entire view by unit type, affordability category, gateway stage and project, allowing users to interrogate the portfolio from multiple angles without switching between files or preparing separate analyses.
01
Portfolio metrics matrix
A cross-development breakdown of all key appraisal metrics — units, average and total square footage, gross and net revenue, average sales prices, build cost per square foot, development costs per unit and PBIT — giving leadership and commercial teams a consistent, comparable view across every live development in the portfolio.
02
Unit mix visualisation
An interactive stacked bar chart showing the number of units by type and bedroom count — broken down across private (houses, apartments, duplexes), Part V and PRS categories. Clickable to filter the entire dashboard, enabling instant analysis of how product mix decisions affect financial performance across the portfolio.
03
Affordability breakdown
A pie chart showing the split of units by affordability category — first-time buyer versus other — across the portfolio. Used by the commercial and leadership teams to understand the composition of the pipeline against market demand and planning requirements.
04
Build programme forecast
A line graph showing the forecasted number of units to be built per year across all live developments — giving the business a clear picture of delivery pipeline and enabling capacity and resource planning across technical, commercial and construction teams.
05
Cost vs revenue benchmarking
A bar chart comparing average cost per square foot against average net sales price per square foot by project — with a portfolio average for reference. This view directly supported prioritisation decisions by making the relative commercial performance of each development visible at a glance.
06
Gateway and project filters
Drop-down filters enabling the full dashboard to be scoped by gateway stage (Options, Master Plan, Planning Application, Final Grant), by individual project, by revision date and by unit description — allowing users to focus the portfolio view on the subset of developments most relevant to their current decision.
Outcomes
Portfolio-level decisions supported by data, not manual effort
A portfolio view that didn't exist before
For the first time, the business had a single, consistent view of profitability, product mix and build programme across all live pre-commencement developments — updated automatically each day without anyone needing to open, extract or compile data from individual appraisal files.
Benchmarking became a routine part of decision-making
Comparing projects by PBIT, cost per square foot and net revenue per unit went from a manual exercise to an instant capability. The commercial and leadership teams could interrogate relative project performance directly in the dashboard — supporting more structured and better-evidenced prioritisation decisions.
Cross-functional teams working from the same data
Technical, sales, finance, commercial, construction and leadership all had access to the same dashboard, updated from the same source. The divergent interpretations that came from teams drawing their own conclusions from individual files were replaced with a shared, consistent picture of portfolio performance.
The appraisal process stayed exactly as it was
No change was required to how teams built or maintained their appraisals. The Excel model remained the working tool — the dashboard simply read it. This was deliberate: the value came from aggregating existing data, not from introducing new processes or requiring new ways of working from already-stretched teams.
Technology
Excel appraisals structured for portfolio analysis in Power BI
The solution ingested Excel development appraisal files on a daily basis through a Microsoft Fabric data pipeline — reading the latest version of each appraisal automatically and structuring the data into a consistent model ready for Power BI reporting. The appraisal templates themselves were unchanged; the platform simply connected to them, transformed the data and surfaced it in an interactive dashboard accessible to authorised users across the business via single sign-on.
This approach — ingesting structured Excel data into a governed analytics platform without changing the underlying process — is directly applicable wherever teams are maintaining detailed models in Excel but lack a way to aggregate, compare and visualise the data across a portfolio. If your business builds development appraisals in Excel and needs portfolio-level insight from them, Acumine can deliver the same capability for you.
Work with Acumine
Development appraisals in Excel and no portfolio view across them?
If your appraisals live in individual Excel files and your leadership team has to open each one to understand the portfolio, Acumine can build the dashboard that changes that — ingesting your appraisals automatically, structuring the data and giving every stakeholder the portfolio intelligence they need without touching the models themselves.