To Anyone Who Made the Switch from REPE to PE, was it worth it and what were the challenges?
Current 1st year analyst at a large PERE firm. There's a lot to like about the job and the industry, but real estate isn't very interesting on a property level. It can be interesting on an investment level, especially if you can put your own money in. I think it'd be way more interesting to work on a range of industries rather than just real estate.
If you made the switch from REPE to traditional PE, how do you compare the two and did you have a hard time transitioning?
Hi Analyst 1 in RE - Comm, check out these resources:
More suggestions...
I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.
Not a very common move and will be hard
to transition. If you can and have a corp. pe team at ur firm try to move internally or move to a repe firm with a bigger corp. pe dimension (like the mfs).
Unless you’re at BX, will be hard to land any reputable corp PE offer (not talking about some $200mm PE fund). Only have seen ex-BX repe folks land roles outside of RE
what have you seen them land?
citadel, coatue, internal corp PE at bx (from what i hear this is rare and v hard to navigate), i'm sure you can spin it into MM/LMM PE especially if you've worked on some corporate RE transactions
Is this for acq folks only or AM too?
acq only for the most part
I made this move. Some high level thoughts:
It was pretty damn hard. I moved a bit downstream, not massively, but basically from ~$1.5B RE fund to ~$500M PE fund.
PE is way more interesting. I went into real estate because it was the path available to me in college, but I never loved it.
I make way more money now. ~$125k in RE —> $250k as 1st year PE associate (closer to $325k + carry now after a promotion).
I had a way better lifestyle in real estate. Happy hours and golf outings were the norm then, these days I’m lucky to get one of either in every other month. Deal hours sucked equally, but way more regular way portfolio work mixed in now.
More egos and sketchy characters in real estate (sketchiness not so much at the institutional firms, but very prevalent with independent shops). More live-to-work and yell-at-your-juniors types in PE.
Far more optionality in PE if recruiters are anything to go by - I get inbounds for PE, hedge funds, portfolio company operations and business development, F500 CorpDev or strategy, and the occasional one-off out of left field. Real estate was mostly good for one thing: real estate (my current path notwithstanding). Nothing wrong with that if you love it, but tough if you might want to move elsewhere. By the same token, a lot of people in buyout think about what their next move might be, whereas people in real estate largely wanted to open their own shops (and often enough, did).
I’m very happy to have made the move based on what interests me, but your experience could be entirely different (one way or the other)
hey can you pm me? Have a few general questions about this switch if you had the time. Thanks.
Thanks for letting us know all that. What do you find interesting about PE and boring about REPE? I'm in asset management, which explains some of the boredom. Being in acquisitions would be better, but probably not much more.
I just graduated last year, so I feel like I have a lot of flexibility in changing industries, but do you think sticking it out for another year or so is worth it to come to a better conclusion?
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