Learn to
Read a Real Estate Deal
Like an Owner
During this 90 minutes class, Nick and Dr. Elaine Stageberg will teach you
to underwrite a deal the way they do,
having underwritten billions of dollars of deals and created a successful portfolio
worth $500M+ in assets under management over the past 15 years.
No finance degree required.
There is nothing to buy at the end of the class.
Wednesday, August 12
5pm PT | 7pm CT | 8pm ET
If you’ve ever looked at a real estate deal and thought “this looks great, but I couldn’t tell you if it wasn’t,” this class is for you.
You worked hard for your money. Maybe a decade of training, or years of building a business, or long nights most people will never see.
Now the deals come to you. Syndications, funds, a friend of a friend with an opportunity that can’t miss. Every one of them has a polished deck, a confident sponsor, and a projected return that makes saying yes feel smart.
The challenge is this; most investors have no real way to tell a strong deal from a good pitch.
So they trust the story. They trust the returns on the glossy page. Every few years, a wave of them gets the call no investor wants. The capital call. The sale that never happened the way it was promised. Worst of all, total capital loss.
It is almost never because they were bad with money. It is because no one ever taught them the right questions, and much of this industry is happy to keep it that way.
Here’s what almost no one in this industry will tell you.
Underwriting a real estate deal is mostly judgment, not math.
The metrics everyone worships, cap rate, the seller’s old numbers, projections carried out to two decimal places, are the ones that protect you least. They look precise. That precision is a trap, because no one can predict rent, expenses, and interest rates years out with that kind of accuracy.
The investors who lose money almost never lose because they were bad at spreadsheets. They lose because they trusted the wrong assumptions and never asked the questions that matter. Can I live with this if it goes badly?
This class teaches you to think like an owner instead of an audience. To start with the downside. To judge the people running a deal, not just the building. To read the debt. To ignore the number everyone else obsesses over.
Less flashy presentation. More judgment.
That is how Nick and I have underwritten billions of dollars of deals over the last 15 years, with zero missed distributions, zero capital calls, and zero capital loss.
During this 90 minutes class, we’ll teach it all to you.
What you’ll walk away able to do…
- Start with the downside, so you never bet on a best case you can’t survive
- See why cap rate is one of the most dangerous numbers in real estate, and what to look at instead
- Understand how a tiny change in one assumption can cut a projected return in half, and why you evaluate deals in ranges, not exact numbers
- Know why the seller’s track record matters far less than you think, and the question that actually determines your return
- Spot whether you’re buying below replacement cost, the margin of safety no spreadsheet can give you
- Judge the people running a deal, because operations decide your return more than the building ever will
- Read the debt and the capital stack well enough to know if a deal is a solid hold or a time bomb
- Ask the questions that separate a real operator from a good salesperson, before you wire a dollar
No jargon. No finance degree. Just the way two people who have underwritten billions of dollars in deals think before they invest
“This is for you if”:
- You invest in passive real estate deals, or you’re about to
- You’re a busy professional, a business owner, or an accredited investor with money to put to work. You want to protect and choose good investments
- You’ve felt that uneasy pull of wiring money into something you couldn’t fully explain
- You want to invest with confidence instead of crossed fingers
“This is not for you if”:
- You’re looking for a get-rich-quick pitch. We teach the opposite. Boring, durable, and built to last
- You’re attached to the way this industry usually evaluates deals. We’re going to challenge a lot of it, starting with the metric almost everyone worships.
Meet your hosts…
Nick and Dr. Elaine Stageberg are the founders of Black Swan Real Estate.
Together they own more than $500M in multifamily real estate, across 2,300+ doors, with around 700 investors alongside them. In 15 years, they have never missed a distribution and never made a capital call. Not once.
Elaine trained as a psychiatrist at Mayo Clinic, and she reads a deal the way she once read a person, looking underneath the confident presentation for what is true. Nick runs the underwriting and operations, and has personally evaluated thousands of deals to find the handful worth owning.
They built their entire portfolio from nothing. Nick and Elaine both came from families who experienced deep poverty, built their careers and their net worth through blood, sweat, and tears, and know exactly what a dollar costs. That is why they teach this the way they do, plainly, in language anyone can follow, and for free, because the people who most need to protect their money are almost never the ones being taught how.
Why we’re teaching this for free
People ask why we’d give away the exact thing we could charge for.
The answer is simple. An educated investor makes better decisions and sleeps better doing it. The more people understand how real estate works, the fewer of them get hurt. The operators who fear an educated investor are usually the ones running deals that can’t survive a hard look.
There is nothing to buy at the end of this class. It’s a teaching class, not a sales pitch. Just the education we wish someone had handed us when we started.
Come learn to read a deal like the person who owns the building, even when you’re the one along for the ride.
Hear from our Clients …
Questions People Ask
Not at all. This class is built for smart people who are new to reading deals. We teach in plain language, and we skip the jargon on purpose.
Yes. There’s nothing to buy, and this is a teaching class, not a sales pitch. We teach it because an educated investor is a better and calmer investor.
Register anyway and we’ll send you the replay.
No. This is an education. We’ll teach you to evaluate any deal, from any operator, so you can protect your own money. What you do with that skill is entirely up to you.
Anyone who invests in real estate deals they didn’t build, or is thinking about it. Busy professionals, business owners, and accredited investors who want to stop taking deals on faith.
Yes. This is live, so we’ll answer questions in real time. That’s one of the biggest reasons to attend live rather than watch a recording.
About 90 minutes, including time for your questions.