Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith is President of Rachel Smith Consulting, Inc. She specializes in real estate and securities due diligence and financial communication. For the past 15 years, she has worked in various capacities within the real estate and securities industry, with a focus on the management of the due diligence process for real estate and credit funds, broker-dealers, and money managers. In her current role as an independent consultant to real estate and securities companies, she works to maximize the effectiveness of the companies’ capital market platforms as well as to protect the downside of the real estate investments.

Before Rachel became a consultant, she served for four years as the head of the due diligence team at CNL Financial Group, facilitating the due diligence that broker-dealers performed on the CNL-sponsored funds. During that time, CNL had over $9 billion in assets under management. Prior to that, she was on the acquisitions team for the CNL real estate group and also oversaw investor relations for two opportunistic REITs and ten private placements.

Rachel began her career with SunTrust Bank in 2004 as an underwriter and lender in the bank’s commercial real estate group. Her experience at SunTrust taught her to underwrite conservatively to protect the assets in varying economic cycles.

Rachel earned her Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Florida in Gainesville, and her MBA, with a concentration in Finance, from the Crummer Graduate School at Rollins College, Orlando. While studying for her MBA, she interned for two years with CNL Realty and Development, and studied abroad in Nottingham, England.