First Week!

Hey everyone, sorry for the late post, but my Google account basically locked me out on Friday evening (which meant that every service associated with Google that I use was not functioning for me). 

I think my mentor, Mrs. Hammond, put it best when she stated "real estate is immensely interesting because all of the little bits of analysis come together to form a bigger picture". I spent the entire week geeking out over  how to put together all of the pieces of information that go into a loan request. A loan request is meant to present all of the information any party making a loan request for the construction or refinancing of a loan could need; there's the basics, like location, age of the building (or buildings), occupancy, and so on. It doesn't just stop there. There's lots of maps which each address a different scale (city, neighborhood, locality), demographics information, and sales comparables, among other things. That's not even the coolest part though. I filled out official employment paperwork! I have a company email! And my own desk! I can even go to the bathroom without signing out- talk about a step up from BASIS life. I've never felt adultier (I know that's not a word-let's just go with it for the time being) in my life.

It seems to me so far that I've heard most of the terms that I was hearing on a daily basis thrown around before, but I suppose I never paid enough attention to realize that each one is so much more significant than it seems at first glance. Sales comparables are literally exactly what they sound like: properties that, on the basis of price, location, and quality, are similar to the property of interest. After spending a couple hours on Friday making a map of 38 sales comparables, I learned, or rather saw, that a lot of information is necessary to make any large financial decisions, even if it takes looking at 38 different (but often very closely clustered) cases to get an idea of what you're looking for.

My work throughout the week was learning how to piece together a loan request, and as such, all of the different documents that are included have their own creation processes. Even though the loan request that I will eventually make will be for one deal (which may or may not be the apartment complex next to the light rail- things are still being negotiated and I'll know more as time goes on), I practiced by making documents for several different deals, including an industrial complex and an apartment deal. I worked on the maps for part of the week, as well as gathering previous tax information on an apartment deal. Before this, I literally had no idea what an Assessor was, much less that Maricopa County had one. Navigating his website was easy enough, but with every piece of information that I came across, I kept asking myself, "how did he manage to put all of this together in one document?" I suppose that's another question I'll be able to answer ten weeks from now.

I've also learned to be grateful for that AP Economics class I took last year impulsively (and by impulsively, I mean that I thought 13 AP exams wasn't a high enough number and I needed 2 more). I was lucky enough to know what all of the different taxes mentioned and not to be completely lost as I read the template loan request Churchill provided me with, but there were still terms that I have a very shaky idea of what they mean. I guess that leads to me to what I want to do next week, or at least what I hope to do.

Capitalization rates, among other terms,  are still a mystery to me, but so far, they haven't come up that much in my work. I promise I won't do the thing where I ignore the problem until I absolutely have to address it, but I have to read at least a few Investopedia articles before I can say that I understand everything. Next week will probably be a continuation of this week: I'll make more parts of loan requests, and, as other deals progress, there's a possibility that sometime in the near future I will be taking pictures of properties of interest to be included in the loan requests (I never thought I'd be thanking myself for taking Digital Photography during freshman year). I don't currently know what the situation is with the apartment complex I was talking about in my last post, especially as situations in these deals shift constantly, but I'll post it here as soon as I know. The takeaways from this week are:

1. Real estate involves so many minute details coming together to form a big picture, like an impressionist painting (you know, the ones with the dots. I was never great at art).

2. Google Maps is overly excited about showing me points of interest, and  I don't know enough code to overcome it, even after spending at least an hour reading up on JavaScript and trying several lines of code I found online.

3. I never thought I'd be this excited over gigantic lists of numbers and clustered points on maps.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!