Acquisitions interview prep.

Behavioural questions to expect

1. Walk me through your CV.
2. Walk me through your most impressive deal or underwriting.
3. Tell me about a weakness, a failure, or feedback you've received and worked on.
4. Why real estate development — vs acquisitions at a REIT, REPE, brokerage, or banking?
5. Why a developer and not a REIT or REPE fund?
6. Why the firm?
7. When you're competing for a site against a top competitor, what's the pitch to the seller or landowner that makes the firm win?
8. How does the firm's capital partner base and balance sheet shape the acquisitions pipeline today?

Technical concepts to master

• The developer pro-forma — from rent roll to yield-on-cost

  Stabilised Year-1 NOI build · Total Development Cost (TDC) · Untrended and trended yield-on-cost · Residual exit value and development spread · Sensitivity flex — basis, rent, cap, schedule

• Capital stack as the acquisitions team sees it

  LP equity — institutional capital · GP equity and co-invest · Construction loan · Mezzanine and preferred equity · Permanent / agency take-out at stabilisation

• Sourcing channels and basis discipline

  Broker-marketed processes · Off-market and direct landowner relationships · Programmatic JV with landowner or capital partner · Basis discipline — what 'making money on the basis' means

Practical drills

• A multifamily development site has a $20M land asking price. Hard + soft + financing + contingency comes to $80M, so TDC is $100M. Stabilised Year-1 NOI is projected at $5.5M. The market exit cap rate for stabilised Class-A multifamily in this submarket is 5.25%. What's the untrended yield-on-cost? What's the development spread? Would you advance the deal? And if the market exit cap moves 50 bps wider during your hold, what's the impact on residual value?
• A 300-unit Class-A industrial site in a Sun Belt secondary market: $40M land asking, $120/sq ft hard costs on 350K rentable sq ft, 12% soft cost load, 5% contingency, 6% construction interest + reserve. Market rents support $8.50/sq ft NNN at stabilisation. Expense ratio (net of reimbursements) is 12%. Market exit cap for stabilised Class-A industrial in this submarket is 5.50%. Walk through how you'd build the underwrite, decide whether to advance, and structure the capital stack.
• You're handed a one-page teaser on a 200-unit multifamily development site. The teaser says: land ask $25M, fully entitled, broker estimates $5M NOI at stabilisation, three other Class-A deliveries hitting the submarket within 18 months, current submarket vacancy 8%, exit cap 5.0%. Walk through what would kill the deal for you and what you'd need to see to advance.

Smart-question anchors

• Sourcing pipeline — broker-led vs off-market vs programmatic JV, with one recent named win
• Basis discipline and IC kill rate — what walking-away looks like at the {firm_name} and how junior team members get IC-room exposure
• Underwriting standards — stated minimum untrended YoC, target development spread, project-level IRR threshold, and how those have moved over the last 12-24 months
• Product and submarket rotation — where the team is leaning in vs exiting, what senior leadership sees in supply pipeline data
• Capital partner platform — institutional LP relationships, programmatic JV structures, fund vs deal-by-deal posture and how that shapes what the acquisitions team can chase

Sourced from

Urban Land Institute (ULI) — Real Estate Development handbook (Peiser + Hamilton) · Adventures in CRE + Break Into CRE interview prep guides · Wall Street Oasis (WSO) — Real Estate forum + REPE interview guide · Mergers & Inquisitions — REPE and Real Estate Development interview prep · CCIM Institute + Argus Enterprise underwriting standards