Adventures in CRE Audio Series

One important aspect present in real estate more than any other industry is the need to shoot above your station. Alex Williams, a Financial Analyst at CBRE Capital Markets and our guest today exemplifies this. As just an intern in college, he cold-called and asked to speak with the CEO to close a deal. In this episode, watch as Sam asks Alex about his experience shooting for the stars as an inexperienced young professional.

A huge thank you to Alex for talking to us about his career thus far. His experience is extremely valuable for other young professionals to learn how to further their skills and career.

Welcome to the Adventures in CRE Audio Series! We begin the series talking with the creators of the Adventures in CRE website, Spencer Burton and Michael Belasco.

We discuss the site’s inception, evolution, and growing and evolving community. We also discuss the audio series and preview how it provides insights and answers to many of the questions Spencer and Michael field regularly from their readers on topics such as real estate financial modeling, careers, education, and the commercial real estate industry in general.

Michael and Spencer tell the story about their initial ambitions with the site, which was primarily meant to fill a lack of online resources related to real estate financial modeling. The goal was to also help the both of them expand their knowledge and skill sets in areas that were of critical importance to their careers and share that work and what they learned with others.

Over the years, the site has grown to cover other topics its readers have asked about. A.CRE focuses on sharing quality content around three main areas our readers care about most:

1. Learning and using advanced concepts in real estate financial modeling.
2. Gaining the education needed to be successful in commercial real estate.
3. Preparing for and advancing a career in commercial real estate.

View the show notes from this episode

Learn to model real estate like a deal-seasoned pro

Welcome to the A.CRE Audio Series! On this episode, I am here once again with the creators of the Adventures in CRE website, Spencer Burton and Michael Belasco. Today we have a special guest Ben Stevens.

Today we are actually continuing a previous conversation. We are picking up where we left off from the last episode with Ben. Towards the end of Ben’s time working on his MBA, he began writing a book called The Birth of a Building. He continued that effort following graduation and eventually published the book. It is now used as part of the curriculum of several top business programs in the U.S. to help teach real estate development. In this episode, Ben shares a lot of great perspective and talks more in depth about his book.

As far as deal-making, and deal doing are concerned. the last three episodes or so have been really focused on the making side. But making deals is great, but if you can't get them closed, they're not worth anything. In this episode, we're beginning to bridge over to the doing side.

Episode 5 is the second part of putting together your capital stack for deal-making and deal-doing in commercial real estate. Where the last episode talked about equity, this episode specifically talks about debt. Hear about the three things we think about concerning debt in your capital stack.