Life Co Internship Ex Ops?

Hello!

Thanks to the advice of WSO, I began networking and got myself an internship in the CRE department of a regional LifeCo company that invests in commercial mortgages. My question is how do I leverage this position or make the most of it?

From my interviews it seems that they deal with mostly smaller borrowers (they talked a lot about guarantor's for the loan), but it seems all over the country, and all over the place but yet very few people I've talked to recognize their name. For example, they told me about their refinance of a large water park that is the only one in a 90+ mile radius near the largest city in the state, or financing the corporate headquarters for some company that sells custom socks to the NBA. I've been told that these LifeCo's only choose vanilla assets but these seem to be out on the spectrum that I didn't consider. I'm assuming this is a good thing to have diversity to different types of loans and variation of client size. How can I use this internship to prepare me for graduation? How will other firm's view my lending experience coming from a LifeCo internship? I'm interested in moving into a firm that uses their own equity (with leverage if necessary) to purchase value add deals and hold.

Thanks in advance

5 Comments
 

Lurkingforopportunity, bummer your thread hasn't had a response yet. Maybe one of these threads could point you in the right direction:

If we're lucky, the following pros may have something to say: RE Bootcamp cmontgomery Fidel_Cashflow

I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.

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Congrats on the internship. I currently work in lending for a major national lifeco where I also did a summer internship.

The majority of assets you look at will be more traditional than the ones you mentioned; though unique deals like that will pop up time to time. My lifeco is also getting into some higher-yielding, value-add stuff. That said, stabilized, traditional assets in core markets are our bread and butter in the lifeco space.

As far as leveraging this internship to get to an equity shop— I don’t see why you couldn’t make this happen. Another intern at my lifeco leveraged his experience to get an acquisitions position full-time at an equity shop with 40B in AUM. Numerous people who worked for my company full-time also moved over to positions at large, name-brand equity shops.

 

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