Real Estate Analyst (FTC, 12 mos)

ABOUT THE TEAM The Global Real Estate Strategy & Transactions team enables OpenAI’s worldwide growth by executing complex real estate transactions and maintaining a highly controlled global portfolio of leases, projects, and capital investments. The team partners with Finance, Legal, IT, HR, and external brokers to ensure that every real estate commitment is financially sound, contractually accurate, and operationally executable. This function is responsible for the financial and data backbone behind OpenAI’s global footprint - ensuring leadership decisions are supported by clean models, validated data, and auditable business cases. ABOUT THE ROLE The Real Estate Analyst contractor will support development and execution of real estate financials, approvals, and transaction closing. This contractor role will ensure every real estate approval, lease, amendment, and capital request is accurate, validated, consistent, and decision-ready. You will own the data, templates, financial models, and validation processes that underpin all global real estate investment decisions. This is a high-trust, high-precision role. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES Approval Infrastructure and Templates - Own and maintain standardized approval templates across all regions. - Manage NDA tracking and COIs for all offices - Validate that all submissions are numerically accurate, internally consistent, and compliant with REW, Finance and Legal standards - Reconcile scope, rent, term, incentives, CapEx, and cash flow between LOIs, leases, amendments, and approval forms. - Route approvals for final review internally to ensure accuracy and completion Financial Modeling & Cash Flow Control - Build and maintain lease-level and portfolio-level cash flow models including: 1. Base rent, escalations, and free rent 2. Operating expenses and gross-ups 3. Tenant improvement allowances and CapEx 4. Deposits, LOCs, termination rights, and exit costs - Ensure models are audit-ready, formula-driven, and version-controlled. - Stress-test assumptions and proactively flag risk, leakage, cost variances, or structural inconsistencies. Data Entry, Validation & Portfolio Integrity - Maintain the single source of truth for all real estate financial and contractual data. - Ensure data across models, approvals, lease abstracts, and reporting tools always ties out. - Detect and correct rounding errors, mismatches, stale assumptions, and missing fields before they propagate. AI-Enabled Execution & Automation - Use AI tools to accelerate: 1. Lease abstraction and comparison 2. Error detection and reconciliation○ Data extraction and normalization 3. Model auditing and scenario checks - Continuously improve how data is captured, validated, and reported through automation. Cross-Functional Enablement - Partner closely with Finance, Legal, Transactions, and Project Management to ensure inputs are aligned. - Provide clear, defensible financial outputs that leadership can rely on with confidence. - Track open items, owners, deadlines, dependencies, and risks so transactions continue moving across multiple parallel workstreams. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business, Real Estate, or a quantitative field. - 4-6 years of experience in real estate finance, corporate finance, portfolio analytics, transaction support, or similar roles. - Exceptional attention to detail — you consistently catch issues others miss. - Advanced proficiency in financial modeling and structured spreadsheets. - Experience working with approval workflows, budgets, leasing. Preferred Qualifications - Experience reading commercial leases and supporting commercial leases, renewals, amendments, and CapEx approvals. - Familiarity with real estate approvals, or investment committee processes. - Experience using AI-driven tools for document analysis, data validation, or financial modeling. - Comfortable operating in fast-moving, high-accountability environments. What Success Looks Like - In this role, you will: 1. Make it impossible for bad data to reach leadership. 2. Ensure every real estate approval is accurate, consistent, and finance-grade. 3. Use AI and automation to increase throughput while improving quality. 4. Become the trusted backbone behind OpenAI’s global real estate investment decisions.