Real Estate Business Transition
I am currently a real estate attorney (4yrs) who is considering switching to the business side of the profession.  While I am proficient in the legal and high level aspects of real estate acquisitions, dispositions, and leasing, I have little to no background in the business analytic side of things.  Any advice on the transition, including the value of obtaining Argus or Excel certifications would be great.  Specifically, I am considering obtaining the Argus Enterprise or Argus Valuation DCF certifications but it is not clear which would be more helpful.  I also noticed on the Argus website that the Argus DCF support was stopping in 2017 so does it make more sense to obtain the Enterprise certification?  Thanks!
[{"id": "cz4qluy", "text": "Learn excel, learn how to create your own dcf, saves you tons of money in the long run.. plus a deeper understanding of why and how you are making the calculations will add to the overall value you bring to a client later in your career", "replies": [{"id": "cz4qpm9", "text": "Thank you for the advice and I am definitely becoming more familiar with excel.  Any advice on argus?", "replies": [{"id": "cz4qurt", "text": "I've never used argus, I've only seen reports created from it sent by other brokers. It essentially is a structured excel sheet that let's you fill in the blanks. Could be useful tho in helping you understand underwriting and cash flows. ", "replies": [{"id": "cz4sp6b", "text": "Analyzing multi tenant deals with multiple leasing categories in excel would be really time consuming.  Argus saves a ton of time with this, especially if you're looking at portfolios.", "replies": [{"id": "cz5gxpa", "text": "It would be time consuming if you recreated a spreadsheet everytime, but set up an input page and an output page and its basically the same thing. All you would have to do is change the inputs each time.", "replies": [{"id": "cz5hbp6", "text": "It would be painful to account for a number of different leasing categories, as well as tenant specific reimbursements.  If you've got 50 tenants with 25 different expense reimbursement structures, creating a base excel template to deal with that would be ridiculous.", "replies": [], "depth": 6}], "depth": 5}], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cz4r62q", "text": "DCF will do you better in the short run. In my experience, Enterprise has not yet been adopted by most firms' underwriters/appraisers and has some bugs that need to be worked out. I recently joined an investment sales team and have found the best thing to do is to understand the mechanics of underwriting. It is much better to fully grasp real estate finance and struggle through Argus than it is to be proficient with Argus yet have little deeper understanding of how the software derives NOI, IRRs, Value, etc.", "replies": [{"id": "cz4reqv", "text": "Thanks! Any tips on how to best get that underlying knowledge?  Ideally I'd like to get that knowledge and some sort of certification somehow to show I'm serious about making the transition.", "replies": [{"id": "cz4rs4r", "text": "I believe the two most highly touted textbooks are Real Estate Analysis and Investments (David M. Geltner, Norman G. Miller) and Real Estate Finance &amp; Investments (William Brueggeman, Jeffrey Fisher). Pair these with either Argus certification and you'll be in a very competitive position. As an analyst, I spend more hours a day reading leases and other legal documents than I do in models, so your background should give you a huge leg up as well.", "replies": [{"id": "cz4vtm1", "text": "About a quarter of the way through the Brueggeman book and its pretty good. I can follow the math and concepts but would definitely need to reference back to the text if asked about something specific (such as the Cf analysis)", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}, {"id": "cz4t1dq", "text": "You can fuck around with textbooks or you could go take Josh Kahr's class. Pricey but worth every penny. Online, I would look at REFM or Breaking into Wall Street's real estate course. Both are solid and reasonably priced. ", "replies": [{"id": "cz5cl78", "text": "Upvote for REFM", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cz4xkb5", "text": "get your CCIM", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cz5cjya", "text": "You can try to get DCF certified, but just know that Argus is going to discontinue support services for it by the end of this year.\n\nAE (enterprise) is the way to go IMO b/c that is what Argus is pushing clients towards. Not to mention AE is light years better than DCF once you learn to use it.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]