How Experience in Public Accounting Transfers to Investment Work
Public accounting is usually described as a demanding apprenticeship, and the demands people mention are hours, deadlines, and busy seasons. What gets discussed far less is the analytical wiring the work installs. An auditor spends years learning to distrust the first number put in front of them, to trace a balance back to a source document, and to ask whether a set of financial statements actually reflects the economics of the business behind it. Those same instincts sit at the center of investment work, especially in commercial real estate, where a single assumption about occupancy, expense reimbursement, or lease expiration can move a valuation by millions of dollars.
The Audit Habit: Evidence Before Opinion
Every audit begins with assertions. Revenue is real, expenses are complete, assets exist at the value claimed, and disclosures tell a reader what they need to know. Testing those assertions is repetitive by design, but the underlying discipline is transferable: an auditor learns to separate what a management team believes from what the documents support. An underwriter runs a comparable process on a rent roll, a trailing operating statement, or a capital budget, and the analyst who has already spent years reconciling ledgers tends to move through it faster and with fewer surprises.
The path from those habits into investment analysis is not theoretical. His biographical site describes Mark Tersigni as a real estate investment professional and Certified Public Accountant whose career has spanned public accounting, corporate finance, and commercial real estate investment, progressing over more than a decade from auditing investment companies into underwriting and managing multibillion-dollar portfolios, with work centered on how assets are valued, financed, and positioned for sale.
Property-Level Analysis as a Second Language
A commercial property is a small business with an unusually lumpy revenue base. Rent comes in on staggered schedules, recoveries from tenants depend on how leases allocate common-area costs, and a single anchor vacancy can reset the economics of an entire center. Someone trained in audit learns to build a trail from the lease abstract to the billing to the general ledger, and that trail is exactly what a credible underwriting file requires.
The earlier stages of a public accounting career reinforce this. Audit work across industries such as private aviation, electric utilities, mining, and manufacturing exposes an analyst to very different cost structures and capital intensity, and later work auditing public and private investment companies adds familiarity with SEC filings, financial statements, and fund-level reporting. On the asset management side, similar skills reappear in annual budgeting, quarterly KPI reporting, investor reporting and performance narratives, hold/sell analysis, and real estate tax appeal work — the unglamorous functions that determine whether an investment thesis survives contact with an operating year.
The Portfolio View and the Corporate Model
Property-level analysis answers whether one asset works. Portfolio strategy answers whether the collection of assets produces the return the ownership expects, and the gap between those two questions is where many analytical processes break down. Consolidating individual business plans into a single corporate view requires consistent definitions, disciplined version control, and a willingness to reconcile numbers that arrived in incompatible formats.
That translation layer is squarely in the wheelhouse of someone with an accounting background. The consulting practice where Mark Tersigni is listed as founder, Complete Property Advisors, describes itself as headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with national expertise, and offers consulting and hourly analyst services to commercial real estate owners and investors. Its listed focus areas — cash flow underwriting, hold, sell, and refinance analysis, transaction due diligence support, Excel model creation and maintenance, comprehensive business planning, and employee training in tools such as Argus and Excel — read like a catalogue of the transferable skills an audit-trained analyst brings to an investment team.
Financing, Debt Maturity, and the Discipline of Detail
Debt is where accounting detail meets capital structure. Loan covenants, debt service coverage, cash management provisions, and maturity schedules all depend on numbers that must be defined precisely and reported consistently, and a property approaching maturity forces a decision that cannot be deferred: refinance, extend, sell, or restructure. An analyst who has spent years testing financial statements tends to be comfortable in that environment because the questions are documentable rather than rhetorical.
The scale involved can be substantial. Public descriptions of his work reference management of more than $1 billion of property-level commercial mortgages, providing analysis for refinancing, extension, and maturity decisions, as well as contributions to the origination of a $1 billion single-asset, single-borrower CMBS loan described as the largest open-air retail securitization of 2023, which required property-level analysis across roughly forty assets. An additional public profile link for Mark Tersigni exists on Crunchbase and is best treated as a supplementary directory listing rather than a source of substantive detail.
Open-Air Retail and Enclosed Malls: Where Judgment Matters
Retail is often discussed as a single category, which is a mistake. A grocery-anchored open-air center serving everyday needs operates on a different economic engine than an enclosed mall anchored by department stores. Parking fields, common-area maintenance, expense sharing among tenants, anchor lease provisions, capital needs, and the distinction between physical occupancy and the timing of lease expirations all shape value in ways that broad headlines cannot capture.
A September 2026 IBTimes article bylined Tom Robbins, in which Mark Tersigni outlines the investment case for open-air retail centers, makes a version of this argument: that sweeping narratives about retail’s decline tend to blur the differences between formats, tenant mixes, and cost structures that actually drive performance. His published discussion compares open-air centers with enclosed malls and emphasizes property-level fundamentals over category-level generalizations.
Making the Transition Deliberately
For accountants considering a move into investment work, the practical advice is to translate rather than to describe. Rather than listing audit engagements, an analyst is better served by framing experience in terms of what it produced: models built, reconciliations resolved, reporting packages designed, and processes improved. Familiarity with Argus and Excel, including Power Query, alongside reporting platforms such as Power BI, MRI, and Yardi, matters because investment teams live inside those tools, and the ability to move fluidly between a property-level model and a consolidated view is a genuine differentiator.
It also helps to know where to ask questions. The contact page maintained by Mark Tersigni lists Columbus, Ohio, and is set up for inquiries about commercial real estate, underwriting, asset management, finance, and investment strategy — useful context for anyone mapping a similar career path. His public biographies note a Certified Public Accountant license in the State of Ohio since 2014, currently inactive, which is a reminder that credentials open doors but the analytical habits built while earning them are what carry a career forward.
The broader point is that public accounting and investment work are less separate than they appear from the outside. One discipline tests whether the numbers are true; the other asks what those numbers are worth and how they should be financed, repositioned, or sold. The analyst who can do both — who can verify a lease abstraction and then argue for a hold or sale decision grounded in it — occupies a valuable position on any real estate investment team. This article is informational only and does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice.
