You will be fine. People like to think there is this huge difference between debt and equity, but it is just different parts of a capital stack. Good lenders underwrite to the same extent as equity, they just generally use more conservative assumptions. If you learn to model it doesn't matter if you plug in 2% rent growth or 7% rent growth or if you plug in 50/psf rents vs 55/psf rents.

Understanding the process and the why is way more important. That you will learn

 
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All of the lenders I've worked at (life cos and debt fund) did full dcfs for all properties, including multifamily. Would we direct cap a stabilized asset to get a ballpark value during the surveillance process after close, yes, but we would never underwrite that way.

Hard to capture tenant rollover risks, potential trigger periods, large capital needs if you are just doing a direct cap.

The only lenders I know that direct cap would be lenders that work with small deals (like sub 10mm) or stabilized multi only.

 

A lot of lenders will underwrite the PROPERTY-LEVEL as thoroughly as the equity side, but they don't look beyond the property-level i.e. into waterfall distributions, which is a huge part of equity underwriting. This is because they get first priority on cash flow, so what do they care what happens with the residual?

Not to say you can't make the switch, you for sure can (especially earlier in your career), but it's just not fair to say that there aren't differences. The investor-level returns are determined by the equity side of the capital stack and how that portion of the deal is structured, which is an enormous portion of successfully making money in this industry as an investor.

 

Most debt funds use leverage (structural, warehouse, LOL, etc.), which means that they have to do the same deal level "equity" underwriting so they can evaluate their return on investment to the fund.

Back leverage turns a debt fund into an equity investor, just at a different part of a cap stack.

That said, my fund actually models the full equity performance on deals. It helps us evaluate if our debt is cheap or expensive.

 

Depending on the fund, you should have reasonable exit ops to the equity side. I spent ~3 years at a startup debt fund in the Midwest and just received an offer from a development firm I plan on taking.

 

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