I first met Dr. Bharat Sangani, Chairman and Founder at Encore Enterprises, when I was 17. Through my ISM program my senior year of high school, Dr. Sangani was one of my interviewees. I reached out to him the summer after my first year at college, in which he allowed me to intern at Encore as a summer 2019 intern.

Through my courses and experiences at Berkeley, I was beginning to get more of a feel for the operations and thinking behind professionals in the real estate industry. I was hungry to get an inside look and truly immerse myself in the experience of acquiring multi-million dollar deals in different sectors within real estate.

Encore Enterprises is a vertically-integrated investment company full of intelligent and driven employees. I had the pleasure of meeting and working with the Vice President of every department, learning and completing projects related to each department. I would like to extend my thanks to the VP's and equity leaders who showed me the ropes of financial modeling, underwriting, hedge fund trading, asset management, and raising equity.

Throughout my summer experience at Encore, I had the opportunity to look through numerous financial models and study the waterfall structures of various deals. I spent many hours in my cubicle pondering the ramifications of each number on the Excel sheet, gathering data from Costar, and ultimately building my own model.

One of our first tasks as interns was to conduct competitive auditing to provide a recommendation if one of Encore's multifamily properties in Houston could benefit from a rent increase. Through our research on the demographics of the Houston market and rent trends from various reports, we concluded that a rent increase could be used to amplify cash flow by up to 33%.

I had the chance to sit in on multiple investor meetings and presented pipeline deals at a large investor offering meeting. I spoke with a few of the limited partners, learning more about their backgrounds and their decision to invest in real estate assets in particular.

Towards the end of my internship at Encore, I partnered with my co-intern to create a private placement memorandum for a potential multi-use development project in Arizona. Through this process, I got a deeper sense of what it takes to raise equity and communicate the prospects of a fund or deal with limited partners.

Ultimately, I am grateful for the great experience I had at Encore Enterprises, and I learned much more than I expected. I gained a deeper understanding for the components and make-up of a financial underwriting model especially for multi-family and hospitality assets. I furthered my knowledge of capital raising by working with the equity department and presenting to investors. I got a better feel for the operations of private equity in general by developing a PPM and receiving waterfall structuring demonstrations.

Thank you to Encore Enterprises for a wonderful summer!

I spent my summer 2019 gaining internship experience at a Dallas-based private equity real estate firm.