Private Equity Associate: Real Estate (US)

What you'll do

The US real estate edition of Mercor's PE Associate modelling project, following the same format as the Consumer & Leisure (France/Europe) variant. You receive a synthetic deal document pack for a real estate transaction, build a working model from it, and then peer-review two anonymised models that other contractors built on the same deal.

Deliverables:

• An editable Excel workbook with live formulas, source references and stated assumptions
• A short written rationale and a completed review scorecard for each of the two peer models, judged against a fixed set of criteria

For a real estate associate, the waterfall is usually familiar, and the harder part is the discipline the brief asks for: every assumption traced back to a page in the pack, with no template to lean on. Reviewers will be checking the same thing in your model.

The listing does not say what the models are used for. Several independent builds of one synthetic deal, scored on fixed criteria, is a typical way to create expert evaluation data, but the ad does not confirm it.

Who qualifies

• 2–4 years total: about 2 years in investment banking (Real Estate or Industrials coverage) followed by 1–2 years in private equity
• Currently or recently an Associate at a real-estate-focused mid-market or upper-mid-market PE fund
• Able to build a financial model from source documents, without a template
• Fluent English
• United States-based (a hard location requirement)

Note the IB path: Industrials coverage counts alongside Real Estate, which widens the pool beyond pure REIT and property bankers.

What it pays

$80–100 per hour, paid weekly on Stripe or Wise, identical to the European and infrastructure variants. At the estimated 20–25 hours over 1.5–2 weeks the project is worth roughly $1,600–2,500 in total.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Short, well-defined, and finished in about two weeks
• Open to associates with as little as 2 years of PE
• Industrials bankers qualify, not only real estate coverage

Less good:

• US only
• One-off; no ongoing work is promised
• H-1B and STEM OPT holders are excluded
• Contractor terms; the project can be extended, shortened or concluded early

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as an hourly remote contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026. Experience profile, effort estimate, location and pay are the ad's own. See Mercor.