3176 students

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This is the first course in the 16-course Accelerator. In this case-based course, you will learn to value income-producing real estate using the Direct Capitalization method.

Regardless of your role in real estate, you will use the concepts, skills, and techniques learned in this course almost daily.

In this course you will:

  1. Learn to build out a static real estate pro forma for a multifamily investment, modeling from Gross Rental Revenue to Net Operating Income
  2. Derive an appropriate capitalization rate (“cap rate”) from a competitive set of similar properties in the market
  3. Combine the net operating income and cap rate to arrive at an estimated value for the investment
  4. See how the principles learned in this course apply in the real world

CASE DESCRIPTION – THE FOLES

You have recently been hired by A.CRE Advisors as part of their multifamily acquisitions team, underwriting prospective investments. Your boss has called you into his office to discuss an Offering Memorandum (“OM”) he just received from a broker, East Lang Ellis, for Foles Tower – a 300 unit, Class A, multifamily high rise in the Center City submarket of Anycity, USA.

Your boss would like you to put together a basic real estate financial model using the information provided in the OM and the supplemental documents that have been uploaded to the broker’s “War Room”. He is requesting you use both the direct capitalization and discounted cash flow methods to assess the value of the opportunity.

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