Real Estate Investment & Asset Management
Real Estate Due Diligence
How to investigate a real estate acquisition before you commit. This course teaches the due diligence framework and red-flag thinking across the three core workstreams -- legal/title, financial/commercial, and technical/physical -- and shows how to turn findings into conditions, price chips, or a walk-away. Built for emerging-market realism, where title and registration risk is acute and thin data makes physical and commercial verification decisive.
The promise
Investigate an acquisition and turn findings into conditions, price chips, or a walk-away.
By the end you can
- Run legal, financial, and technical workstreams
- Apply red-flag thinking to surface real risk
- Convert findings into conditions and price chips
- Recommend proceed or walk-away
Where this course takes you
This course is part of 1 role track. It ends in a professional deliverable and stacks toward a named certificate.
Curriculum
The DD Framework & Red-Flag Thinking
What due diligence is, when it happens in the deal timeline, the DD gate and the deal-killers, and how to build a red-flag register that drives the whole investigation.
Legal & Title DD
Title, tenure and registration -- the number-one emerging-market risk -- plus encumbrances, permits and approvals, and disputes, rights and restrictions.
Financial & Commercial DD
Verifying the rent roll and lease terms, testing income sustainability against reality, and interrogating operating costs, arrears and recoveries.
Technical & Physical DD
Building condition and capex liabilities, environmental and sustainability risk, and services, snagging and handover -- especially for off-plan.
Synthesis & the DD Report
Consolidating findings by materiality, translating them into conditions and price chips, and forming a go / no-go / go-with-conditions recommendation.
Course assessment
Sign in to open lessons and track your progress.
The capstone project
This course ends in a real professional deliverable. Complete the course — including the capstone — and your certificate is issued automatically.
Your final deliverable
Due Diligence Report Capstone
A red-flag DD report with four parts: (1) a red-flag register by workstream (legal/title, financial/commercial, technical/physical) with likelihood, impact, and evidence needed per item; (2) a consolidated materiality assessment ranking findings across workstreams, separating quantifiable from open items; (3) a conditions/price-chip schedule assigning the correct lever (condition, price-chip, or retention/indemnity) to each finding, evidenced and carrying requires local legal advice / requires local market data flags where numbers or legal conclusions are unavailable; and (4) a go / no-go / go-with-conditions recommendation stated in one sentence up front, with deal-killers explicitly tested, conditions and chips specified, protections for residual risk, and accepted risks named.
Graded on five criteria
- Method & rigour — The right framework, applied correctly, with the working shown — not just an answer.
- Data honesty — Every figure is sourced, triangulated, or explicitly flagged “requires local market data”. Nothing is invented.
- Analysis & judgment — Assumptions are explicit, at least one alternative is weighed, and the key risks are quantified.
- Recommendation — A clear, decision-useful conclusion a professional could act on — with the conditions that qualify it.
- Communication — Structured, concise, and client-ready — the argument lands.
Pass criteria
A submission passes when it meets the bar on all five criteria — the work is something a competent professional could put in front of a client or committee. The Verified Professional credential is issued on a pass.
Resubmission
Work that isn't there yet comes back marked “needs work” with specific feedback. You revise and resubmit — there is no penalty and no limit on attempts.
More in this academy
Investment Analysis Essentials
Underwriting fundamentals: cash flows, cap rates, and returns under uncertainty.
Asset Management & Value Creation
The owner-side discipline of growing an asset's income and value - business plans, NOI growth, leasing strategy, capex and repositioning, ESG, reporting, and the hold-vs-sell decision. This course takes the perspective of the asset manager acting for an owner or fund, translating an investment thesis into a live business plan and executing the value levers that move net operating income and, through it, capital value.
Capital Markets, Debt & REITs
How real estate is financed and how capital is raised — the capital stack, debt, equity structures, REITs and listed real estate, and capital raising through the cycle, with emerging-market capital realities.