A weekly series on the AI tools and workflows reshaping real estate capital raising — starting with how to build an investor database in hours, not weeks.
Our education business has grown faster than any other part of Thesis Driven over the past year. The topics generating the most demand are a reliable signal of where the industry is heading: raising capital in a tighter market, putting AI to work across real estate operations, and getting inside the asset classes generating the most compelling returns.
We've also been rethinking how we teach. Our longer multi-week courses were popular, but we kept hearing the same thing from our community: they wanted focused, intensive instruction on one topic without a weeks-long commitment. So we shifted to a single-session workshop format. The result is the most ambitious slate of new programming we've put together.
Here's what's coming up.
Investing in Purpose-Built Student Housing
Tuesday, May 12 | 12:00–2:00pm ET
Purpose-built student housing consistently outperforms traditional multifamily, generating up to 2x the revenue per square foot with lower delinquency and 9 to 12 months of pre-leasing visibility built in. Led by Jared Hutter of Aptitude Development, this workshop unpacks how the asset class works and how to get in. Live case studies from Aptitude's Tier-1 portfolio at ASU and SUNY Binghamton cover how to source university demand data, underwrite ground-up deals, and structure capital stacks for institutional exits.
Most raw land deals fail before they start because buyers can't see past the per-acre price to what a parcel could become. This workshop is about developing that eye: how to read a site from aerial imagery, evaluate topography and access before ever visiting, and match land to the right concept, from cabin communities to boutique hospitality. The core lesson is deceptively simple: turn a commodity into a place people want to be.
C-PACE started as a green energy financing footnote; it has grown into a $10 billion-plus market that sophisticated sponsors are using to fund up to 40% of new construction, replace expensive mezzanine debt, and recapitalize completed projects. This workshop is a practical walkthrough of how C-PACE works in practice, and how to fit it into a capital stack across different deal types.
Underwriting a deal used to mean weeks of manual work before anyone got to a real decision. AI is compressing that timeline significantly. This hands-on session covers rent roll extraction, comp analysis, stress-testing assumptions, and accelerating due diligence from screening all the way to the investment committee. Participants leave with a practical framework for evaluating vendors and identifying the highest-ROI use cases in their workflow.
The OpCo/PropCo structure has become the preferred model for a new generation of real estate operators building platforms rather than portfolios. Separating the operating company from the real estate lets them enhance unlevered yields and access growth capital that a traditional real estate fund cannot provide. This workshop walks through how to design the capital stack, structure JV and leaseback arrangements, and apply the model across flex office, single-family rental, and niche hospitality.
Capital raising historically relied on relationships supported by static investor lists, fragmented CRMs, and weeks of manual deck iteration. This workshop shows sponsors and IR professionals how to plug AI into every stage of the raise: investor sourcing, deck and memo creation, outreach automation, webinar production, and term sheet review.
A three-hour interactive workshop for owners, operators, and developers showing how AI in commercial real estate actually works, followed by real-world use cases across operations, development, and acquisitions. Case studies from Camden, Invitation Homes, and Lennar ground the instruction in practice. Participants leave with a framework for applying AI in their business and tools to cut through the hype.
This session examines how AI is reshaping the architecture, engineering, and construction stack across the full project lifecycle, from design and pre-construction through delivery. Built for owners, operators, developers, architects, and builders navigating a field where the tools are moving faster than most teams can track.
This workshop approaches AI in property management through a thought experiment: what would it take to build a property management firm with zero human employees? That lens forces participants to work through the sticky parts of implementation: data accessibility, PMS integrations, automations, and agentic workflows.
This workshop is for GPs, capital raisers, and IR professionals who want to build an automated AI agent that runs a capital raising operation.The session walks through creating one from scratch using Claude, covering system instructions, fund document memory, and email and CRM integrations, then demonstrates it executing a full campaign live: investor research, personalized outreach, LinkedIn posts, and pre-meeting investor briefings.
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
