I’m making a living by interning at a private equity firm that specializes in residential real estate development for second tier cities in China.  I’m on the underwriting team and my role is specifically research. There are two deliverables that I produce.
-The first is market research on demographics and economics.   The target city is compared to other cities in China, and features of the  specific development zone are highlighted.
-The second is a competitive analysis of existing real estate developments that focus on a similar market to our project site.  After data collection, we compare the competitions’ developments to ours.
Those deliverables as the basis for drafting the underwriting memorandum’s section on sub-market and project site.  It does involve a degree of marketing.
It’s nice to operate within a very structured framework, as opposed to surveys, ethnography, user testing, analysis of cultural dimensions and psychographics.  Those broader methods were used in Parsons, and still not as established as what is used in PE, I hope to use those frameworks in the future.<br>

I get a view of the larger operations of PE, investing, and business in China.
Adapting to this is quite a learning curve, with PE being new to me and most of the research being done in Chinese.

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