If you’re the CFO at a real estate investment management firm, your job isn’t just about keeping the books clean. It’s about making sure the entire machine runs smoothly – from fund accounting to investor reporting to capital strategy. You’re the air traffic controller for the business. Every dollar in and out – you’re tracking it, validating it, and tying it back to the big picture.
You’re not just in finance. You’re in control.
What’s on a CRE CFO’s Plate
Own the Numbers
You’re the final stop on the financials – portfolio-level, fund-level, corporate-level. You own the NAV calcs. You know the waterfalls. You make sure performance reporting matches reality, not just what the acquisitions team projected two years ago.
Oversee Fund and Property Accounting
You manage relationships with third-party fund admins and property managers. You’re double-checking GLs, validating accruals, and ensuring the data coming in is consistent, reliable, and report-ready. You don’t tolerate garbage in because you know it means garbage out.
Manage Cash, Capital, and Compliance
You oversee fund flows, distributions, capital calls, and tax strategy. You make sure investor reporting is accurate, audit-ready, and on time. And when the SEC or your LPs have questions, you’ve got the answers.
Support Fundraising and Investor Relations
You partner with IR to support the story with numbers. You prep financials for the pitch deck. You respond to investor DDQs, track co-investments, and make sure commitments match expectations. The faster the raise, the faster you need to deliver.
Connect Finance to the Rest of the Business
You’re the hub between asset management, acquisitions, and investor reporting. You’re tying back deal-level activity to fund-level goals – and spotting when the story starts to drift. Your job is to make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is spending.
What Makes the CFO Job Hard
Daily & Weekly
- Chasing down data across teams and systems. You’re trying to validate a distribution or run a performance report, but accounting’s on one system, asset management’s in Excel, and the data doesn’t match.
- Cleaning up investor reporting. Someone updated a rent roll, but it never made it into the model. Now you’ve got to backtrack, reconcile, and answer for the variance.
- Audit and compliance prep, always ongoing. Whether it’s internal controls, third-party audits, or LP questions, you’re constantly preparing documentation – even when nothing’s technically due yet.
Monthly & Quarterly
- NAV and distribution calcs under pressure. The models are manual. The source data is inconsistent. And LPs want their reporting fast and with no surprises.
- Portfolio reporting variance headaches. Actuals vs. underwriting don’t line up. You’re trying to figure out what changed, where, and why – with limited visibility.
- Capital management decisions. Do we call capital now or later? Refinance or hold? You’re modeling scenarios and making judgment calls based on imperfect data.
The Real Risk? Losing Trust in the Numbers
CFOs live and die by data integrity. But in too many shops, that data lives in ten different places – and none of them talk to each other. You’re pulling from Excel, PDFs, accounting systems, emails – and hoping it all lines up by the time the report hits your LPs’ inbox.
That’s where Pereview comes in. We consolidate your data, standardize it, and give you one version of the truth – so your team isn’t stuck reconciling numbers. You get real control. Real visibility. And fewer surprises.
Because when the numbers are right, the business runs right.
