How to break into Real Estate Private Equity (w/ 0 RE Knowledge)

In the lines below, I share with you what I did, the things I studied, and how I went from zero knowledge in RE to more than 25 interviews in firms like Blackstone, Carlyle and EQT (+ analyst offers from Mega Funds). This way you don’t have to waste the time I already did trying to find all these info and increase your chance of success. Hope it helps 😊! Let’s dive into it:

Just some quick disclaimers before we start: I’m not an RE expert by any means. You can follow the steps mentioned here and still not get an internship/analyst position in Real Estate PE. In this guide you will NOT learn: the basic technical questions/answers for breaking into IB (these may come up during your RE PE interviews, please refer to the 400 BIWS), how to magically land an interview or how to become millionaire by flipping apartments in NY. There are better discussion topics in this forum around these.

I’ll be dividing this quick guide into 3 parts: (i) Motivation, (ii) Real Estate Private Equity 101 and the (iii) Interviews themselves. Feel free to jump around them as you like it, I tried to make it as modular as possible:

(i) Motivation – So, assuming you are here I imagine you are somewhat interested in Real Estate, if this is not the case, we still get you covered if you want to break into the industry for any other reason. RE is a rather specific industry and people tend to stay for the long run. I realized that everyone I had met fell into 3 categories that were labelled based on their answer to “Why do you want to do RE PE?”:

(a) First one: your parents or someone very close to you is into Real Estate and this sparked your interest. Maybe your parents had some investments in flats or vacation houses, anything here can work. Just be ready to answer the questions around the type of RE asset you are allegedly presenting as your motivation for this job. [E.g. If you mention your parents buy houses in the surroundings of NY, a follow up question could be “What’s the cap rate range for the region; why did they buy there; how did they find the tenants”, things like that. (If you don’t know what a cap rate is, no worries, the technical part will come a bit later in this post)];

(b) Second one: you have had some type of connection with RE before that caught your interest. Maybe you studied RE in college, worked in a RE transaction your past IB summer or helped build a software related to RE. Anything works tbh, as long as you can make it compelling to the listener and you have the elements to back it up [Pro tip: don’t lie, the interviewer can likely tell if you are lying about something he works with every day];

(c) you have your own RE portfolio or have invested in REITs on your own (I assume if you bought you know how to guide someone over your investment thesis); Being completely transparent, there was no one I knew that landed a job in RE PE at an entry level that didn’t fall into these categories. In case your read this and you don’t fall into any of them, don’t be sad, you still got a chance as you can work your way into fitting into (b) and (c) on your own through classes, school projects, student clubs or personal investments. What I did in my case was to start investing in some REITs I had access to and try to come up with a thesis behind each one of them (easy if you look into their investor presentations) + I had worked on the beginning of a Developer’s IPO during one of my internships;

(ii) Real Estate Private Equity 101 – I had never taken a course of RE before started studying for my interviews, so many of the things here may sound redundant to those with a background on it. To learn all the technical parts it took me about 3 weeks, given I didn’t have to study the basics of finance. For the rest of this section, I will assume you already have a solid base in Finance and know most of the 400 questions in the Breaking into Wall Street book (btw they have two sections dedicated to Real Estate there with some good technical there, just stay away from the REIT specific ones if you are not interviewing for a REIT). This is how you are going to build your base on RE PE:

(a) What’s RE PE and what is the bare minimum you need to know to understand what’s going on your interviews -> https://mergersandinquisitions.com/real-estate-private-equity/ . Please digest this page like you’ve never did before. It will teach you the basic terminology, scientific base and even some fancy technical questions that may appear. After carefully reading it (and watching the video on modelling, even if you still don`t fully comprehend it), you may notice something strange: “Where are the 3 financial statements?”. Well, in RE PE most of the analysis are done in a proforma financial statement, which is nothing more than the merger of your Income Statement and Cash Flows with a few extra headlines and weird Reserve Capex flowing around. It is primordial that you memorize all the lines on it as you will use it to answer most, if not all, your technical exercises like paper LBOs and modelling tests. What was extremely useful for me was to download the free excel of the Model and just play around linking stuff to understand how it properly worked. To practice technical questions, I advise you to go through the BIWS RE sections and talk to people who have already interviewed for similar roles. I have never come across a database for only RE (if you reader have other questions, please leave it in the comments). Some examples of questions I got were: “What are the types of RE assets? Can you order them by cap rate?, What’s your understanding of a caprate and why is this a useful metric?, You have two identical buildings next to each other and they are exactly the same, why would they have different cap rates?,  What are the key metrics when analyzing a RE investment (sometimes this would be more specific like ‘KPIs for a RE investment in Student Housing’), What macro KPIs would you look into to analyze a market for RE? How do you increase the revenue in a facility?”. After you have gone through all that was mentioned, it is a good idea to focus on technicals related to the investments the firm you are interviewing with does. If they focus on Value Added multifamily homes, read about past investments in assets like these, go through REIT reports related to this subsector and try to grasp what really matters to an opportunity like this. A gold tip I can give you is: always think about Demand and Supply (more info on this on the Interview section).

(b) Now you know all that you need about the “micro” part of Real Estate. The part that’s missing “macro” comes up next. In a RE PE interview, you will need to understand (1) how the macro environment shapes the RE world (once again pay attention to the streams the fund invests in), e.g. “With interest rates raising what do you expect to happen with the housing market in NY?” (don’t forget -> supply and demand), (2) follow what’s happening right now in the RE (and RE PE space). For this one I highly recommend this youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/BreakIntoCRE?app=desktop) w/ quick videos and very useful condensed info, just be aware that sometimes he focus a lot on US aspects which may not be as relevant for other geographies you are interviewing for. News, reports and specific research can be found in CBRE, JLL or any of the mentioned here (

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. [Thank you Breaking into CRE guy for making our life easier]. Another important source of info here will be the people you network with. Just be careful to not sound boring or completely lost when trying to understand the market from them; and (3) you need to understand whats trending in the industry. Best way to address this is (once again) to talk to people in the industry. During your coffee chat you can casually ask “what have you been looking into recently in terms of asset type? Or what do you think is the next big thing in RE?”. As of the day I’m writing this, some of the big things are (i) last mile logistics, (ii) life science RE, (iii) data centers and (iv) flexible workspace. Be ready to answer questions such as “What does high inflation means for RE? What were the biggest losers and winners during the last crisis in terms of RE? Which RE assets are more susceptible to a crisis? How does it reflect on their KPIs? Which RE class you wouldn’t invest in right now? Why?”. Tbh the questions here can be really broad, so don’t hesitate to narrow it down during your interview to a specific geography or specific asset class if you feel the need to. It worked well for me in this matter. There you are, now you have the macro and micro aspect of Real Estate basics. One extra tip I can give you is: try to “build” a RE model from scratch for a house or apartment you would LBO. This will teach you immensely about how these things work and will prepare you really well to paper LBOs, which I got in like 80-90% of my interviews. If you want to learn how to do one properly here is a very good guide on it. Not specific to RE, but you just got to adapt it to your RE proforma and you should be good to go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIH-3bgocTQ&ab_channel=PeakFrameworks).

One extra tip I had forgotten but: the more senior the person interviewing you, the less likely you will get finance technical questions and the more you will spend talking about the market, what’s happening right now macro wise, the asset classes doing well or bad, etc so focus on this once you get through the first rounds.

(iii) The Interview – Final part of this guide. Let me just quickly go over the “how to get the interview”. The chance of you being called to the interview after applying are linked to 3 things:

(i) your credentials (school, past experiences, diversity, and, less but present, your family);

(ii) your network (who you knew beforehand or the people you got in contact on LinkedIn who helped you get the interview);

(iii) what the fund recruiting needs (if they need someone who speaks German and you happen to speak Korean and English it won’t work. Don’t take it personally, it just happens).

The good thing is that out of these 3 you can influence 2 of them ahead of time. You can boost your credentials through summer jobs, gap years or even by taking a masters. And you can more than definitely get interviews coming from non-target schools by networking your way into it, specially given there is no such thing as “on cycle recruiting” for most of the RE PE funds. If you don’t know how to network your interviews here is a quick guide, once again from Peak Frameworks (thank you Peak Frameworks dude,

). But before you start sending messages, it’s important to touch on some points that will be extremely important to your interviews. First, who are you interviewing with. My advice here is understand the type of RE PE you would like to do and start by only applying to the funds that do this. It will serve you nothing to spend your time studying multifamily RE, if you are also interviewing with funds that invest only in Resorts and this is what you want to do. Better to focus your energies on what matters. That being said, if you can’t find anything within your interests but you still want to do RE, start broadening your target group. Maybe you can start your career in one type of RE and later switch to another one, I saw this happening a lot in the fund I was in. I didn’t follow this line of thinking and it costed me a big amount of time studying things that weren’t relevant for what I really wanted to do. Cool, you have now built your list of funds, you started networking and applying to these locations, and you get your interview [Congrats]. What to expect? My interviews were always divided into 3 main sections:

(i) fit questions (mainly around my motivation to go into RE, why Value Add/Opportunistic/Core, why this fund specific, why PE RE vs PE Infra/PE/IB/Private Debt, past exposures to RE, past professional experiences and personal projects);

(ii) technical questions, the tip here is to apply what I wrote on the RE PE 101 to the specifics of what the fund invests in. Do not lose your time trying to learn everything on all the RE asset classes. Remember, we are not trying to become the best RE investor in the World [at least not for now]. We are trying to land an internship/analyst position, so use your time wisely;

(iii) investments, in this part they usually try to see if you understand what their investing strategy is. Why they position themselves this way (aka what’s the edge of it, try to get a grasp of it during your networking). During my interviews, I would often get asked to pitch an investment idea or to tell them about a transaction they had recently done (while explaining the reasoning behind it). The gold tip here is once again supply and demand. Quick example: “do you believe buying a multifamily home in the 16th of Paris a good investment?”, a good answer would follow the lines of “I believe a good investment comes from the supply/demand dynamics. Let’s analyse the supply of multifamily homes in the 16th of Paris (you tell the interviewer the type of info you would look into this. One idea could be, if you will rent the flats after buying, to understand how many flats are available to rent rn, how many are expected to come to the market in the near future because of developments and vacancies. This type of data you can get with providers like CBRE or even with the Municipalities in the real world)” then you jump and talk about the demand for flats there. You will get familiar with this way of analyzing investments rather quickly, when reading reports and investment memos etc. This way of reasoning gives you an important edge on interviews: You won’t forget anything important, and you will be speaking your interviewer’s language. A quick tip on the Investment Idea is to search for what a similar fund has invested recently and copy the reasoning. i.e. you are interviewing with Carlyle and you saw that KKR bought a student house in London one or two years ago. Search a bit and you will likely find press releases about the reasoning behind it or people giving their view on the deal. Don’t forget that an important part of your investment thesis [at the real job and in your prep] is the risks associated. Take some time to reflect on what could go wrong and how would you hedge against these. Remember, Investing = Opportunity & Risk.

Additional to these questions, you may get more standardized ones like “what do you expect to learn from this experience? What activities will you be doing here? How do you stay up to date on the RE market? If you had xx amount of money, how would you invest it?”. Basic questions that can appear in any interview. Once again, rely on your networking calls to get insights for these and to understand what interviewers in that fund like to hear.

(iv) Extra Section – Some random info that I wished people had told me when I was starting this journey of prep:

(0) You will likely get a modelling case during your recruiting process. Don’t stress too much, RE models are easy to find on the internet. Remember that your modelling test will need to be done in a couple of hours. This means that it won’t be something super complicated but you need to be quick on Excel. The modelling tests I came across were multifamily homes, warehouses and corporate offices lasting usually from 1h to 2h or something you should build over a weekend;

(1) You don’t always need a finance internship or 1/2y of IB before going into RE PE, which may be the case in other types of PE. Most of the funds are more interested on your motivations and if you have the skills that it takes (if you don’t trust me on this one just look at the amount of RE PE analyst and intern roles available vs other PE careers);

(2) Real Estate is a rather specific and sticky career. Think wisely before committing to it as you will likely be doing this for a couple of years. That being said, RE is a world on its own. So many sub asset classes, different things to learn and get specialized on. You will have plenty of space to learn, make money and have fun if you have an interest of it [nowadays this is changing a bit with more people moving into Prop Tech, Buyout, Infra etc, but I don’t have enough info on this to provide any outlook];

(3) you can learn most of the things you need to secure a job on your own as I stated in the lines before. However, the people you will speak to during your networking will provide you with insights that are even better than what you can learn online. So prepare well your questions beforehand and make sure the call is also enjoyable to the other person. Worst case scenario if the job doesn’t come, at least you got a friend;

(4) now if you didn’t manage to secure an internship in RE PE, don’t worry. It's not the end of the world and it may not even be your fault (recruiting crisis happen). A good alternative may be going into something related like IB RE (https://mergersandinquisitions.com/real-estate-investment-banking-group/) or IB infra/PE Infra which is fairly similar and tends to keep the RE door open. Actually, most of the seniors in the fund I was working came from IB backgrounds without a RE focus, so I don’t believe there are a lot of things you can do that will close the RE door. You can always try in one or two years for an analyst or associate role (or build your own RE portfolio using some of the info you learned during your recruiting).

This is the end of the guide. I tried to write everything I wish I knew when I was starting to study for my first RE interview. I hope it helps you all and if you have more tips related to this please do not hesitate to put them in the comments section.