Real Estate Institutional Investing Introductory Course

What you’ll learn
By the end of this course, you will have a comprehensive and well-rounded perspective of institutional real estate investing and real estate fund/portfolio management.
You will find out about careers in real estate and gain new insights into what a real estate portfolio manager at an investment fund does, including the stages and lifecycle of a real estate transaction.
You’ll gain an understanding of the key concepts and principles in institutional real estate investing and real estate portfolio management.
You’ll learn new concepts and ideas that help develop an investor’s mindset, even if you don’t work in the sector.
You will understand the different types of real estate investment funds, specifically how they raise capital, and how their risk appetite, investment time horizon, and return targets differ.
You’ll be able to talk confidently at networking events or interviews with your newly gained real estate investing knowledge.
You will feel inspired about working in real estate or learning more about the sector.
Requirements
Some basic knowledge in finance, investing and economics might be beneficial.
Description
In this course, you will learn about real estate investing in an institutional context, which means from the perspective of a private equity fund, pension fund or a developer.

Real estate investing is both an art and a science. To understand real estate and be a great real estate investor, you need to learn multiple disciplines, such as finance, economics, and politics.

This course covers the multi-disciplinary and financial aspects of real estate investing (debt financing, deal structuring, financial modelling, transaction execution, portfolio concepts) and also regeneration and placemaking.

Because at the end of the day, real estate is all about creating beautiful places that people like to live and work in. Buildings can transform lives and bring communities together.

So being an excellent real estate investor is not just about crunching the numbers but about appreciating aesthetics, history, and heritage. It’s also about understanding communities, what people want and need.

Andy Warhol said: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art”.

This course gives you a good overview of all these aspects.

You will discover:

Real estate as an asset in a context of an investment portfolio

Types of real estate acquisitions

Portfolio strategies

Career options in institutional real estate investing

Introduction to valuation approaches

Waterfall distribution

Key concepts and metrics

Regeneration and placemaking principles

You will know what a career as a real estate fund manager at an asset manager like Blackrock or a private equity firm involves, and you will have a comprehensive overview of institutional real estate investing.

You’ll also feel inspired and excited about working in real estate or learning more about the sector in more detail.

This course does not cover:

Flipping and renting houses or where to buy houses

Personal investing

Specific markets and where to invest

Actual deals/transactions

Financial modelling

This course covers breadth rather than depth. Each session within the course could easily be expanded into a separate stand- alone course, as real estate investing is a complex and technical area. As an introductory course, this course is intentionally short (2 hours) since we are all short on time these days.

In detail, the course consists of 20 topics, covering:

What is Real Estate?

What is Institutional Investing?

Real Estate as an asset class

Real Estate characteristics

4 types of real estate investment

Types of real estate acquisitions

Portfolio strategies

Different types of funds and characteristics

Key stakeholders in real estate

Career options in real estate

Different real estate sectors

Real Estate development deal structure

Real estate development process

Real Estate transaction lifecycle

Development financing

Real Estate valuation approaches

Key terms and metrics in real estate

Waterfall distribution cashflow (promote)

Regeneration and placemaking principles

Walkthrough of an example of a financial model

Who this course is for:
Students exploring career options.
Young professionals looking for a career change and curious about real estate.
Professionals in finance/technology/banking hoping to learn more about the real estate sector.
Fund managers wanting to learn more about the real estate sector.
Anyone else who wants to expand their knowledge and want to learn more about real estate investment management.