Head of Institutional Acquisitions

Build the Institutional Underwriting Standard for AI in Real Estate

Location: London

About Smart Bricks

Smart Bricks is building the AI-native intelligence layer for real estate.

Every year, trillions of dollars are invested across residential, commercial and alternative real estate using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual workflows. We're building an AI-native platform that enables investors, developers, lenders, governments and Fortune 500 companies to source opportunities, underwrite investments, perform due diligence and manage portfolios using AI.

Alongside our software platform, we're building an Applied AI Lab that works directly with some of the world's largest real estate organisations to redesign complex institutional workflows using AI. Every customer engagement generates institutional knowledge. Every deployment strengthens the platform. Every improvement compounds across every future customer.

We've raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world's leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.

We're now building our founding team in London. Our London team is based at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's leading venture capital firms, putting us alongside some of Europe's most ambitious founders, investors and technology companies.

We're looking for an exceptional real estate acquisitions professional to lead our investment function: the person who decides what institutional-grade underwriting means at Smart Bricks and holds everything we build to that standard.

Why exceptional people join us

• $5M+ raised, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
• Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars
• Building our core team in London at Balderton Capital
• Underwriting alongside AI agents, not building the same model for the hundredth time
• Working on live deals with some of the world's largest real estate investors and lenders
• Define how an entire industry underwrites, rather than running one more process inside it.

Why this role?

This is a real estate investment role, not a technology role.

You’ve spent years in acquisitions at a real estate private equity firm, institutional investor or lender. You’ve sourced, underwritten, bid on and closed transactions. You’ve sat in investment committee and defended your numbers. You know what a credible underwriting looks like, and you know how much of the work behind it is repetitive.

At Smart Bricks you’ll be the senior investment professional in a team of engineers and researchers. You’ll underwrite live transactions for our institutional customers, decide what the platform must get right for an acquisitions team to trust it, and make sure that what we put in front of an investment committee would survive one.

The question you’ll ask every day is the one you’ve always asked:

Would I put my name on this underwriting?

The difference is that here, the answer gets built into a system that every institution on the platform benefits from.

What You’ll Own

Lead Underwriting on Live Acquisitions

Underwrite real transactions for our institutional customers as their acquisitions teams would:

• Build and review acquisition models for direct asset, portfolio and platform deals
• Reconstruct in-place income from rent rolls, leases and operating statements rather than accepting the OM
• Set assumptions on rent growth, occupancy, capex, exit yield, leverage and hold period, and defend where each came from
• Analyse levered and unlevered returns, equity multiple, cash yield and downside cases
• Determine bid pricing against the mandate’s return hurdle
• Draft investment summaries and IC memos to an institutional standard

Set the Smart Bricks Underwriting Standard

Define how Smart Bricks underwrites real estate: methodology, assumption governance, return and risk conventions, and what an investment committee‑ready output contains. Compare the platform’s underwriting to yours on every deal and decide when it’s good enough to go in front of a customer, and when it isn’t yet.

Bring the Acquisitions Workflow Into the Platform

Work with the Founder, Head of Product and Head of Applied AI to encode how acquisitions teams genuinely operate:

• Screening and mandate fit
• Underwriting and modelling conventions
• Due diligence and third‑party report review
• Investment committee preparation and approvals
• Business plan tracking post‑close

Go Deep by Sector

Our customers deploy across logistics and industrial, living and residential, office, hospitality, and alternatives including data centres and student housing, in equity and credit. You’ll define the sector‑specific analysis each requires, starting where our customers are most active.

Own Market Evidence

Make sure the transactions, rents, yields, supply and demand evidence the platform relies on is current, sourced and defensible to an investment committee.

Live With the Customer

Spend time inside acquisitions teams at real estate private equity firms, sovereign and pension funds, asset managers and lenders. Understand their mandates, hurdle rates and approval processes. Then make sure the platform reflects how they actually invest.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months, you'll have:

• Underwritten a meaningful volume of live acquisitions across several sectors and geographies for institutional customers
• Defined the Smart Bricks underwriting standard and the process for holding platform outputs to it
• Materially improved the platform’s underwriting accuracy against realised outcomes
• Built sector‑specific underwriting frameworks for the sectors our customers deploy in most
• Documented the underwriting conventions of several institutional customers so the platform applies them automatically
• Become the person institutional customers call when they want to know whether an output can be trusted
• Become the trusted investment counterpart to the Founder, Product, Engineering and Applied AI

Who We're Looking For

We’re looking for a real estate investor with exceptional fundamentals who wants to change how the work is done rather than do it the same way for another decade.

You’ve underwritten real transactions with real capital at stake.

You’ve built models from scratch and defended them to people more senior than you.

You’ve noticed how much of the work is repetitive, and wondered why nobody has fixed it.

You’ll likely have:

• 6-10 years in real estate acquisitions, underwriting or investment analysis at an institutional investor, real estate private equity firm, pension fund, sovereign fund, lender or investment bank
• Underwritten direct asset, portfolio or corporate transactions across more than one asset class, in equity or debt
• Advanced financial modelling skills and the ability to build an institutional‑grade model independently
• Experience preparing investment committee materials and supporting due diligence through to closing
• A strong grasp of real estate fundamentals, valuation and transaction structuring
• Exposure to more than one geography, ideally including the UK, Europe, USA or the Gulf
• Genuine curiosity about AI and the appetite to work daily alongside engineers and researchers
• Strong writing skills and the ability to explain a deal clearly to someone who has never seen it
• A degree from a strong institution in finance, real estate, economics or a related field. CFA, MRICS or a master's are assets, not requirements. Knowledge of ARGUS is a plus

You’re equally comfortable tearing apart a rent roll, sitting with an institutional client, explaining to an engineer why a model behaves the way it does, writing up a market and making a call on whether an output is good enough.

Experience in AI or software isn’t required.

We care far more about rigorous, curious investors who are excited about redefining how one of the world's largest asset classes gets underwritten.

We believe exceptional people should share in the value they create. You’ll receive a highly competitive salary and a meaningful equity package, private healthcare, flexible working, an annual learning and conference budget, access to the latest AI models and developer tooling, and a seat in our London office at Balderton Capital, alongside one of Europe’s leading VC ecosystems.

How We Work

We hold ourselves to exceptionally high standards. We think like owners, move quickly without compromising quality, solve problems proactively, communicate with clarity, sweat the details, stay relentlessly curious and bias towards action. We optimise for execution and learning, not bureaucracy and hierarchy, and we care more about outcomes than job titles.

Why Join

We move insanely fast, with real rigour and standards, to build the company that redefines how AI works for real assets.

You’ll work directly with the Founder and founding team, underwriting live deals for some of the world’s largest institutions and shaping how the platform thinks about real estate. The work you do here will be applied to every deal the system evaluates, for every institution that uses it, for years to come.

If you’re the type to get out of bed to change how an industry makes its most consequential decisions, in this generation and the ones after, Smart Bricks is the place for you. We’d love to talk.