3170 students

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This is the 12th course in the 16-course Accelerator. In this case-based course, you will learn to model debt from the perspective of both the borrower and the lender.

In this course you will:

  1. Learn about the real estate capital stack, and how debt is an important piece of any capital strategy
  2. Build a mortgage amortization table from scratch
  3. Review various Excel strategies for modeling debt service and loan payoff
  4. Take a look at the most common debt metrics and how to calculate each
  5. Learn to size a real estate loan based on DSCR, Debt Yield, and LTV
  6. Layer debt into development cash flows
  7. Learn techniques for calculating construction interest reserve
  8. Model the levered returns of a real estate investment

CASE DESCRIPTION – FINANCING THE FOLES

You are a member of A.CRE Advisors multifamily underwriting team. You and your team recently signed a letter of intent to purchase Foles Tower – a 300 unit, Class A, multifamily high rise in Center City, Anytown.

Thus far, you’ve put together some basic back-of-the-envelope analysis and run a 10-year discounted cash flow on an unlevered (before debt) basis. Your boss has now asked you to layer in debt to understand the risk and returns of the investment on a levered basis.

You have an investment committee meeting scheduled for the end of the week to seek approval to purchase Foles Tower and you’ll need this analysis completed before then. So you sit down with your boss to discuss how best to model the debt.

PROPERTY TYPE

  • Multifamily; concepts apply to all property types

SOFTWARE RECOMMENDED/REQUIRED

  • While we recommend using Microsoft Excel, as that is the industry standard, this course will work with most other spreadsheet software such as Google Sheets and OpenOffice Calc
  • This course was built using the Google Chrome browser, thus we recommend you use Google Chrome for optimal view experience
  • This course is best taken on a desktop computer, although the platform is compatible with tablet and mobile devices

EXCEL PROFICIENCY REQUIREMENT

  • The course assumes you have at least a basic proficiency working with Microsoft Excel

Instructor(s)

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Spencer Burton

Spencer Burton is the Co-Founder and CEO of CRE Agents, a Vertical AI Agentic Platform changing how work gets done in commercial real estate. With over 20 years of experience as a fiduciary, principal, and founder in real estate, he is a recognized expert in applying AI to CRE. His mission at CRE Agents is to give people back life’s most precious asset—time. By pushing repetitive tasks to AI-driven “digital coworkers”, CRE Agents empowers professionals to focus on high-impact work, driving better returns and more fulfilling careers.

Prior to CRE Agents, Spencer served as President and founding team member of Stablewood, a multi-strategy institutional real estate investor leveraging AI, machine learning, and data analytics. At Stablewood, he co-developed an AI-enabled digital coworker that underwrote and created investment memos for 50,000+ CRE transactions, equating to four years of work for 20 full-time analysts.

Spencer is also the co-creator of Adventures in CRE (A.CRE), the industry’s leading platform for financial modeling, education, AI learning, and career development. Through A.CRE, he’s trained thousands of professionals at some of the world’s top companies and universities.

Spencer has built a reputation as an innovator and thought leader in CRE. He has held senior roles at top institutional firms, helped launch two successful startups, and deployed automation across brokerage, development, acquisitions, debt production, and management.

Spencer holds a Bachelor’s in International Affairs with an emphasis in economics from Florida State University and a Master’s in Real Estate with a concentration in finance from Cornell University.

Free