Adventures in CRE Accelerator Program

Hi Joel and all else who are curious about the accelerator, I was part of the first group who enrolled, so allow me to break down my experiences here:

First thing to mention is that I started the accelerator with minimal finance knowledge (discount cash flows, NPV, IRR, breakeven period) and that's really all you need to know before starting. It is also an excel-heavy program, so it is recommended to at least be familiar with linking formulas and using functions in excel, but honestly, with Google, you can learn any unfamiliar functions on the fly, which is what I did.

The first two courses are on valuations using the direct cap method, and the income method. These 2 courses are meant to be slow at first and easy-to-follow, because they are the groundwork for much of the concepts to be built on later in the program. The pace and complexity picks up quickly after week 3, and believe me, some of these excel models get so large that my computer processor can't even keep up. My favourite part of the course is learning to introduce debt to your models. I never realized how powerful (and risky) debt can be on your equity returns until I started running the numbers myself.

I found the more challenging courses to be on debt and waterfall (partnership) modelling. But both Spencer and Michael make it easy to follow along - you start each course with a pre-built template and as you follow along with the video lectures, they tell you how to build on the template until you finish the model. After that, you put your new skills to the test by building your own model to solve the case study at hand. Yup, they are fictional case studies but you get to extract all your usual info from offering memorandums, operating statements, brokers proformas and rent rolls just like you would in real-life. I found myself spending 2-8 hours a week, on average, to complete the courses. As time goes on, and the accelerator incorporates everyone's feedback, the guys will add new videos/courses, which will always be available to all enrolled I believe.

As for myself, what made the accelerator worth the investment is the forums. This is where you have two industry professionals who can answer not only any questions you have on the course content, but also how things are done in the industry, which is an invaluable resource to have in my opinion.

In terms of comprehensiveness, you'll learn about acquisitions, dispositions, sell/hold, developments. I feel it is important to keep in mind that training to be a guru at formulating excel models does not mean that you will have a foolproof way of landing profitable real estate deals. The old cliché that the model is only as good as your assumptions is true. There is no hard and fast way to underwriting deals, and simply entering inputs will still give you outputs, but being able to justify the inputs will make your model as accurate as possible. This is where the real-life experience from the fellas can come in handy if you're ever questioning your assumption or method. I have always gotten a forum response from them in under 24 hours.

Lastly, in terms of applications, I can't comment on whether it could land you a job in real estate finance because I never tried, and because getting an interview relies on many other factors too. But completing the course will give you a certificate you can highlight on your resume/ Linkedin profile. And from what I understand, some job interviews will require you to complete case studies as part of your application, and this accelerator course will undoubtably prepare you for that.

Feel free to follow up with any questions you may have, I'd be happy to share more of my experiences