When most people picture a real estate investor, they imagine a dealmaker with a nose for a bargain and the nerve to move fast. They rarely picture an accountant. Yet some of the most disciplined investors in commercial real estate come from exactly that background.
Mark Tersigni’s career as a Certified Public Accountant who went on to underwrite and manage multibillion-dollar property portfolios shows why the pairing works so well. The habits that make a good CPA turn out to be the same habits that protect capital when the numbers get large and the stakes get real.
The Accountant’s Eye for What a Property Is Really Worth
Real estate investing is a valuation problem before it’s anything else. What is this building worth today, what will it be worth later, and what has to be true for that to happen?
Accountants spend their formative years learning to answer questions like these without flinching from the details. Before he ever underwrote a shopping center, Tersigni began his career in audit at a Big Four accounting firm, working across industries as varied as private aviation, electric utilities, iron-ore and coal mining, and manufacturing, several of them Fortune 500 companies.
Auditing teaches a particular discipline: assume nothing, verify everything, trace every number back to its source. That instinct is what separates an investor who models a return from one who merely hopes for one.
Mark Tersigni’s Path: From the Audit Desk to a $5 Billion Portfolio
The route from accounting to investing is more natural than it looks. After auditing public and private investment companies and reviewing SEC filings, Tersigni moved into asset management at a private multifamily firm, where he ran annual budgeting, quarterly KPI reporting, and hold/sell analysis across the portfolio.
From there, he became Vice President of Investments at a private-equity-owned commercial real estate company, where he built and led an underwriting team of five analysts responsible for a portfolio of more than $5 billion in open-air retail and enclosed malls. Over two years, that portfolio completed more than $1 billion in property sales.
The accounting foundation never disappeared; it simply scaled up.
Why the CPA Mindset Wins in Real Estate
The advantage gets concrete fast. A real estate deal is only as good as the assumptions underneath it, and CPAs interrogate assumptions for a living. Tersigni contributed to the origination of a $1 billion single-asset, single-borrower CMBS loan, the largest open-air retail securitization of 2023, and that financing demanded precise, defensible property-level analysis across roughly forty assets at once.
There’s no room for a rounding error at that scale, and the temperament to sit with the detail until it’s right is something accounting instills early. Investors who cut corners on the analysis eventually pay for it. Those who came up checking other people’s math tend not to.
Discipline That Protects Value at the Closing Table
The accountant’s value shows up less in the big model than in the small check. On property sales, Tersigni reviewed settlement statements in detail to confirm their accuracy and completeness—unglamorous scrutiny that catches errors precisely at the stage of a transaction where mistakes cost the most. Anyone can be excited about a deal.
Far fewer will read the closing documents line by line to make sure the excitement is warranted. That’s the quiet superpower a CPA brings to investing: a refusal to let a number go unexamined just because everyone in the room wants the deal to close. Over a career, that discipline compounds into real dollars protected.
Translating Numbers Into Decisions
A great investor does more than compute; they communicate. Much of Tersigni’s work involved building the corporate model that private-equity ownership used to forecast returns, consolidating individual property plans into a single portfolio-level view without losing the detail of any one asset.
He served as a regular point of contact for executives and ownership on everything from joint ventures and ground-lease negotiations to options for properties approaching debt maturity. Earlier, in asset management, he wrote performance narratives that explained to investors what happened and why it happened.
Another CPA strength that transfers cleanly: accountants are trained to turn dense financial data into something a decision-maker can act on. Investors who can make the numbers legible to the people writing the checks earn trust that pure dealmakers rarely command. He now shares that thinking publicly, writing about commercial real estate for people learning the business and breaking down his analysis on video.
The Tools Have Changed; the Discipline Hasn’t
Modern real estate analysis runs on specialized software. Tersigni works at an advanced level in ARGUS and Excel, including Power Query, alongside Power BI and reporting platforms like MRI and Yardi, and he has folded modern AI tools into his analysis and reporting.
But tools amplify judgment. They don’t manufacture it. A model is only as trustworthy as the person who built it and the assumptions they were willing to defend.
That’s the enduring case for the CPA-turned-investor: the software gets faster every year, while the discipline of verifying inputs, stress-testing assumptions, and owning the answer stays exactly where it was. His ongoing commentary on the industry reflects that perspective throughout.
The Takeaway
CPAs make great real estate investors because accounting builds exactly the habits large investments reward: rigor, skepticism, and an unwillingness to be impressed by a number until it’s been checked. Glamour has nothing to do with it.
Mark Tersigni’s career is one example of how far those habits can travel, from an audit desk to the underwriting of billion-dollar transactions. If you’re learning the business, internalize the lesson early: the deal is won or lost in the details, and no one is better trained to find them than an accountant.
About the author
Mark Tersigni is a real estate investment professional and Certified Public Accountant (Ohio, inactive) who advises commercial real estate owners and investors as an independent consultant, providing acquisition and disposition underwriting, business planning, transaction management, and financial modeling. Earlier in his career, as Vice President of Investments at a commercial real estate firm, he built and led an underwriting team overseeing a portfolio of more than $5 billion and helped originate a $1 billion CMBS loan. He has been licensed in Ohio since 2014.a
