PropertyMetrics "CRE Investment Analysis Fundamentals" course

[Jason Howell]

I am on the fence on signing up for this course: https://courses.propertymetrics.com/join/iaf/

I'm in a highly active and regimented education-focused period right now and one of my big interests is leveraging some personal relationships I have to get further involved in commercial real estate investing, but its the fundamentals that I know I need work on right now to prepare for that. 

I had already signed up for a course at the local JC to fill my time this next semester, but this course offered by PropertyMetrics on this particular topic costs about the same as the class I was going to take, but focuses more on commercial real estate investing.

Curious to know if anyone has any experience with the courses offered through them? Thanks in advance!

[Jason Howell]

OK just finished the course. Here's the remaining details of my experience:

Module 5 is about Mastering Discounted Cash Flow Analysis, and dives into Internal Rate of Return and Net Present Value and how those are used to determine what your return will be and how much you should pay for a Proforma's cash flows. There's a lot of analysis as to how these formulas are used based on Proforma data, how its calculated given a number of different scenarios, and what it tells us specifically about an investment. Then its all folded into a complete Discounted Cash Flow Analysis to tie it all together.

Module 6 (the final module) is all about leverage, and how Commercial Real Estate Loans work. Basically, how the cost of borrowed funds compares to the yield of a given property. Then into loan underwriting processes, what lenders are looking for specifically when someone comes to them for a Commercial RE loan. This was actually quite illuminating and very interesting to see the process from the lender's perspective. Given tools to calculate loan payment, balloon payment, analysis of loan amortization, points, and calculating the lender's yield. Also, the comparisons made to determine a borrower's maximum loan amount. And a lender comparison pitting four different lender proposals side by side to analyze how an option might look good until you truly compare against the rest with different variables (rates, terms, points, etc) to find the best option given a borrower's unique situation.  Finally, a levered versus unlevered proforma analysis to see the true differences between the two, to find out just how much leverage can increase returns. This was the longest module in the course at around an hour's worth of video. 

I will follow up with overall thoughts as to the effectiveness of this course and ways in which I believe it could be improved.