Episode #92: Financial Engineering with Nikolai Ray

Today’s guest is Nikolai Ray, a Professor in Real Estate Financial Engineering, a FinTech entrepreneur, and a real estate investor. He has structured more than 10 billion dollars in multi-family real estate acquisitions and is also a former professional hockey player, which makes for a very interesting background! Join us to hear Nikolai’s thoughts on knowing your numbers, prioritizing your evolution, and how financial engineering differs from this. You’ll also hear what he looks for when he analyzes his deals twice annually, and what some of the tools are that help him to do so. We discuss comps and reports, as well as why Nikolai is such a heavy value-add investor. He also tells us how his skills have worked together to create his asset management superpower: synthesis. We hope you join us today!Key Points From This Episode:An introduction to today’s guest, multifamily investor, and former hockey player, Nikolai Ray.Why knowing your numbers is so critical: from your underwriting team, to your business execution, to finally exiting.Why a lot of investors stop evolving at the underwriting stage.How financial engineering differs from this with analyzing deals and exposing the next ante.What he looks for when he analyzes his deals twice a year. Helpful tools for analysis including Phoenix.Why Nikolai trusts comps far more than reports.Why Nikolai is such a heavy value-add investor. What he considers to be his asset management superpower: synthesis.Tweetables:“Where a lot of people stop that evolution and underwriting and modeling is they just take a snapshot and then that’s it .” — @nikolairay [03:25]“ I think the ability to synthesize is my superpower. You could be really good at financial engineering or underwriting or modeling but when you’re growing a portfolio as fast and doing such heavy lifting and having so many different parts of your capital stack, you have to be able to essentially just calculate a whole bunch of things.” — @nikolairay [0:00]“I’m a very heavy value-add investor, an opportunistic investor, so I buy horrible stuff, crappy stuff. I’ll buy abandoned apartment buildings, I’ll buy crack houses. That’s the kind of stuff I buy.” — @nikolairay [17:35]Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:Nikolai Ray on FacebookNikolai Ray on TwitterNikolai Ray on InstagramNikolai Ray on TikTokMRexAsset Management Mastery Facebook GroupBreak of Day CapitalBreak of Day Capital InstagramBreak of Day Capital YoutubeGary Lipsky on LinkedInGarzella Group