Understanding and breaking into Apt investing

[Avi Garg]

This post is inspired by the recent (ok a month back) success story posted by @Joe Fairless

Anyways one of the ways Joe mentioned to break into this space is to offer your service to underwrite deals initially. I am an MBA student and would like help the apartment investors/syndicators by helping them underwrite deals (for free unless someone really wants to pay) so that I could learn from experienced people in this space. My plan is to learn while I am in school and when I am done, I can hopefully execute a deal myself. 

Any help/tips/pointers appreciated.

 

[David Thompson]

Avi,

One thought would be to find some local RE MF meetup groups or start one yourself and start meeting w/folks that are involved in syndication deals near you (they can be part of a GP or LP investor) but that's where I'd start.  What experiences do you have underwriting deals?  if none, have you thought about first hiring a coach so that you can walk the talk ?  In as little as 3 months, you could be looking and analyzing deals w/both a quantitative and qualitative approach.

Once you have some knowledge, what about going out and learning to find off market deals?  Most good syndicators have access to what's available to the public (brokers, online, etc) so that's covered pretty well.  I know a syndication group that hires MBA students to just hunt for online deals and do the screening, some underwriting before passing it up to the GP experts to make final decisions.  In these scenarios, if a deal they find is offered on and accepted by seller, the student gets a fixed fee for finding the deal.  Say 10K might be a reasonable fee.  This would help pay for your schooling perhaps while you learn.  

Once you learn how to find and analyze deals, you could then get further into being a bigger player on the GP side via partnering w/others that bring their own expertise, i.e. capital raising.  I like your approach, I just think that to bring value, you need to get some experience / value and start somewhere preferably local and get your network established to boot.