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, how to scope and sequence an investigation under a real timetable, and the workstreams that decide the answer — legal and title, financial and commercial including the covenant behind the income, technical and physical including statutory and fire safety compliance, and the entity, counterparty and tax questions that arise when you buy a company rather than a building. It ends with how findings become conditions, price chips, indemnities or a walk-away, how advisers are instructed and relied on, and what happens after the report. 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 before you commit — scope and sequence the work, run every workstream that can change the answer, and turn findings into conditions, price chips, indemnities or a walk-away.
By the end you can
- Scope and sequence an investigation to the decision, running cheap disqualifiers first
- Run legal and title work, and read encumbrances, permits and disputes for what they constrain
- Verify income against the leases, the receipts and the covenant that actually pays it
- Test condition, capex and statutory compliance, including fire and life safety
- Handle a share deal — entity, counterparty, tax, and the warranty, indemnity and disclosure package
- Instruct advisers with reliance, work to a transaction timetable, and hand findings to the asset team
Where this course takes you
This course is part of 1 role track, which ends in a professional deliverable.
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.
Entity, Counterparty & Tax DD
What changes when you buy a company rather than a building: corporate and tax due diligence, knowing who you are actually dealing with, and the warranties, indemnities and disclosure that carry the risk you cannot investigate away.
Running the DD Process
Due diligence as a managed process: instructing advisers and securing reliance, running the data room and the question list, working to a transaction timetable, and handling what surfaces after the report is delivered.
Course assessment
Sign in to open lessons and track your progress.
The capstone project
This course ends in a real professional deliverable. Use the brief and the five criteria below to check your own work against the standard a competent professional would be held to.
Your final deliverable
Due Diligence Report Capstone
Check your work against 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.
When it's ready
Your deliverable is ready when it meets the bar on all five criteria — work a competent professional could put in front of a client or committee.
Revising your work
The capstone is self-directed: you check your own work against the rubric. Where a criterion isn't met yet, revise that part and check it again — as many times as you need.
More in this academy
Investment Analysis Essentials
Analyse a real estate investment the way an investment committee will read it: the two engines of return, cash flows and cap rates, NPV, IRR and the equity multiple, debt and leverage, defensible underwriting and scenario analysis in emerging markets, and the exit and hold decisions that drive most of the answer. Ends with a recommendation you can defend — including the decision to decline — and an applied toolkit of memo, model, calculator and scenario templates.
Asset Management & Value Creation
Run an income-producing asset the way an owner needs it run: an evidenced business plan, the income and cost levers that actually move NOI, leasing and repositioning decisions tested against the alternative of doing nothing, the loan that constrains what the plan may attempt, performance reporting an owner can act on, and how to manage when conditions turn against you.
Capital Markets, Debt & REITs
How real estate is actually financed and how capital reaches it: the capital stack and what each layer buys, senior debt and what the documents really control, equity structures and waterfalls, REITs and the debt capital markets, structured capital between senior and equity, portfolio construction and allocation, and raising capital across a cycle.