2022 SA Real Estate Investing

Getting your foot in the door is much easier starting as an analyst on a good Investment Sales/Debt Placement team for a national brokerage. Just like in traditional finance, its not unheard of (and definitely easier in RE) to go to the buy side straight out of UG, but its much easier to test the waters and get a foot in the door with a brokerage since they hire a ton of analysts and dev/repe shops run thin on their acquisitions teams. Think of it as BB IB hiring thousands of analysts a year vs a middle market PE shop keeping 3-5 analysts total. 

Also, if you're only an incoming Junior there's a good chance that shops aren't overly responsive knowing that you have 2 years left before they could even hire you. Stick to looking at Linkedin for alumni connections at firms and reach out just asking to pick their brain on the industry and build relationships with these people so in 2 years you can reach out about potential jobs or in 6 months or so ask about internships. 

One last tip, if you aren't aware of the names of a bunch of shops go to the Linkedin pages of the ones you know and look on the side where it says "people also viewed"  and enjoy going down that rabbit hole lol. You can look at the jobs for those companies and see if you can find what you're looking for. Or at the very least, see if you have alumni there to reach out to.