Senior Underwriter

 

Senior Underwriter — AI-Enabled Investment Analysis

Location: Las Vegas / Henderson, Nevada — onsite, with periodic travel for site visits and market tours

Employment type: Full-time, exempt

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

About the Role

Real Capital is looking for a technically fluent Senior Underwriter to drive acquisitions and investment decisions across our self-storage and express car-wash platforms. You will independently evaluate opportunities, own and improve our underwriting models, keep the acquisition pipeline moving, and help build the governed AI workflows that make our investment process faster and more consistent.

This is a high-visibility seat. You will work directly with the CEO, present your own analysis to investors and the investment committee, and set the underwriting standards that future analysts will follow. You will also be the person who translates underwriting judgment into documented, testable systems — the work that determines how much deal volume our acquisitions team can carry.

Who You Are

You are an underwriter first. You can spot weak source data, challenge assumptions, explain what actually drives returns, and defend your own underwriting in front of investors. You are a self-starter who wants to win, and you are genuinely curious about getting better at the craft.

You are comfortable with AI tools and structured data today, and you want to go considerably deeper — we will invest in building that expertise. You bring prior experience with, or at least general exposure to, APIs and workflow automation.

What You’ll Do

Underwriting and Investment Analysis

• Independently underwrite self-storage and express car-wash acquisitions, developments, expansions, and value-add opportunities.
• Review offering materials, rent rolls, historical operating statements, budgets, market data, site information, financing terms, and due-diligence materials.
• Build, audit, and maintain detailed financial models, including operating projections, debt assumptions, returns, sensitivities, downside cases, and exit scenarios.
• Identify missing, inconsistent, or unreliable source data and resolve it before recommendations are presented.
• Research markets and competitors, including supply, rents, occupancy, development pipeline, demographics, pricing, and local operating conditions.
• Prepare concise investment summaries that state the opportunity, risks, assumptions, sensitivities, open issues, and your recommendation.
• Support investment-committee discussions and answer questions with traceable data and analysis.

Pipeline Management and Execution

• Maintain a single, accurate acquisition pipeline showing stage, owner, priority, missing information, underwriting status, next action, and decision date.
• Coordinate with acquisitions, asset management, finance, legal, construction, and operations to keep active opportunities moving.
• Surface stale deals, unresolved assumptions, resource conflicts, and decision bottlenecks early.
• Keep model versions, supporting documents, and decision records organized.
• Support post-close reviews by comparing actual performance against underwriting assumptions, and feed what you learn back into future underwriting.

AI-Enabled Underwriting and Process Improvement

• Document the current underwriting process, model conventions, approval gates, exception handling, and quality-control standards.
• Translate underwriting workflows into requirements for repeatable AI skills, agents, and pipeline automations.
• Validate AI-generated output against approved financial models, source documents, competitor data, and human underwriting conclusions.
• Define failure conditions and human-review gates, so the system flags uncertainty rather than quietly filling gaps with assumptions.
• Assist with data mapping and evaluation of third-party sources and APIs, including competitor, rate, occupancy, demographic, and pipeline data.
• Build lightweight automations yourself, and work closely with engineers on integrations that require production support.
• Track changes to financial models and AI workflows so output stays reproducible and auditable.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work directly with the CEO and investment leadership to prioritize work across the storage and car-wash platforms.
• Take functional underwriting direction from the relevant asset-class leader while maintaining consistent standards and independent analysis.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Help establish scalable underwriting standards that support future analysts and higher transaction volume.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 90 days, you will:

• Take ownership of the active underwriting pipeline, with clear priorities and next actions.
• Demonstrate independent command of our core financial models and investment standards.
• Document the current underwriting workflow, major judgment points, exceptions, and QA checklist.
• Complete accurate underwriting on live opportunities with minimal rework.
• Identify gaps in our market data, automation opportunities, and resource needs that would improve underwriting accuracy and speed.

Within six months, you will:

• Own a consistent, auditable underwriting process across both platforms.
• Reduce manual work and cycle time without weakening investment judgment or controls.
• Validate and support the rollout of an updated AI-assisted underwriting workflow.
• Produce measurable improvements in pipeline visibility, model consistency, and turnaround time.

What You’ll Need

• Bachelor’s degree in finance, real estate, economics, accounting, or business — or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of commercial real estate underwriting, acquisitions, investment analysis, or asset-management experience.
• Advanced Excel and financial-modeling capability, including cash-flow projections, debt modeling, sensitivities, and return analysis.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools for real analytical work — you have put an LLM to work on modeling, data analysis, or research, and can speak to where it helped and where it fell short.
• Ability to independently evaluate assumptions and land on a defensible investment recommendation.
• Strong attention to detail, and the instinct to trace every output back to source data.
• Ability to run multiple active opportunities and deadlines without losing control of follow-up.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Based in, or willing to relocate to, the Las Vegas / Henderson area.

Nice to Have

• Self-storage, car-wash, multi-site operating business, or other operationally intensive real estate experience.
• Hands-on experience with Cowork, Claude Code, Codex, or comparable AI tooling, including structured prompting, workflow automation, or output validation.
• Comfort working with structured data, APIs, SQL, Python, or business-intelligence tools.
• Experience improving underwriting templates, investment-committee materials, or acquisition pipeline systems.

Interview Process

• After completing initial interviews, finalists should expect a working session of roughly 2 hours, which includes:
• A practical underwriting and model-review exercise using an anonymized opportunity.
• A written investment recommendation identifying key assumptions, missing information, and risks.
• A short exercise explaining how part of the underwriting process could be converted into a controlled AI workflow — inputs, outputs, test cases, failure modes, and required human approvals.