Verstavo School of CRE
Two courses on commercial mortgage credit — not how to build the model, but how to read what it produces. Free, on the live public record, with the misses shown.
A commercial mortgage fails two ways — it can't cover the debt, or it can't exit at maturity — and the transfer to special servicing is the market confirming one has happened.
Two ways to die, plus the acknowledgment. Everything upstream — rates, tenancy, employment, the cycle — is a cause that reads through those three. That sentence is the spine of both courses, and nearly all of the work is learning to hold it steady while a tape argues otherwise.
These are reading courses. They come after the modeling course rather than instead of it — the pro forma is someone else's ground, and well covered. What is left is the harder half, and the half no terminal is built for: reading credit, and reading a cycle.
The ground floor.
Property types as regimes, how the money is actually structured, the two axes a loan dies on, and how a cycle turns. The reading course that comes after the modeling course — it assumes you can build a pro forma and starts from what the pro forma cannot tell you.
A few of the chapters
The applied course.
Reading a securitized trust as a book: what the tape reports, what it withholds, and the places where the servicer's language runs ahead of the numbers. Every chapter is a read you can run yourself on the live record.
A few of the chapters
It teaches because it was built by someone learning it — an outsider who had to reason the domain from first principles and left the working on the board. The honesty that makes the signal credible is the same honesty that makes it teach.
Teaching a course? There is a syllabus map with weekly sequencing, the labs mapped to live surfaces, and the gaps marked as gaps.