Real Estate Designations

They hold very little weight. I've been in the industry for 5+ years and have never even heard of CRI. If you're on the finance side of the business then I'd say that CFA would probably be the most meaningful, but also the hardest to attain. I don't think not having any designations would be a huge detriment for your career.

I don't think that real estate is really a certifications game. I've rarely (not never, but rarely) found hard-and-fast designations to be a requirement for a job. Often you'll see a job that PREFERS someone with an MBA or master's degree (full disclosure: I'm in a real estate master's program currently), or sometimes you'll see a preference for the CCIM for certain roles. But it's relatively rare to see roles that require certain designations. I would say having a real estate license is important for a handful of good roles, but usually companies will say that you simply have to get the license within x number of months.

In general, property management is really the only designation-centered field in real estate. I suppose that at, say, Wells Fargo Private Wealth management, which has a real estate investment management team, the CFA charter might be nice to have, but that's a very, very narrow field. I've seen a handful of signatures on incoming emails with CFA designations, but those are few and far between. Also, most real estate groups employ a CPA or CPAs for their financial management, but that's really an entirely separate career.

In general (and this is a generalized statement with many exceptions), advancement in this field (excluding entrepreneurship) is highly dependent on prior work experience and actual skills. I'm in my current role because I worked at another firm that services my current firm, in a role that was highly relevant to the business in which I currently work. I was in my prior role because I was in a role prior which was highly relevant to the job that gave me certain needed skills. And the building blocks go back beyond that.

Thank you for the responses. The question came about because my firm generally pushes for additional designations. I was leaning towards CCIM over CFA, if I do anything, but it is all still up in the air.

The CRI curriculum includes both asset-level and fund-level analysis whereas the CCIM is only at the asset-level. Go the CRI webpage and they do a good comparison of topics covered among related designations (CCIM, CFA, etc.) The CFA covers only a fraction of Real Estate topics.

CRI sounds like something that could be interesting to study, but I've never seen this designation anywhere. IMO CFA will teach you more how to think, but as many have already said it application to real estate is limited. I disagree that it's worthless, I've passed level I only and had in brought up in many interviews how many candidates they've seen that can't get past Level I. That said I also haven't found it useful enough to put in the dedication to pass Level II. I'd say it's less than 10% of analyst/associate jobs that require/prefer a CFA, probably even less at the VP/Director level, but you're also competing with far fewer candidates for firms that do truly care about it.

Last time I took the level II exam there were no more than a handful of real estate questions. To show you how little real estate it involves the institute teaches NOI=Income-OpEx-Reserves. I've never seen any operator take reserves above the line except in hospitality.

Even the MAI is a bit of a joke these days, you basically just take a course where they give you the info for your demo.