I'm in the job market and feeling confused. Which level of acquisitions role should I be going for?
-7 years experience doing acquisitions with some asset management sprinkled in
-comfortable with hardcore modeling across product types
-comfortable quarterbacking due diligence process
-comfortable writing institutional quality debt and equity raise memos
-understand some important parts of PSA negotiation but never handled one
-no experience negotiating JVs
-no broker relationships for off market deals
Depends on the role, that is why the AVP or Sr. Associate role is helpful.
How much have you closed, do you have any reports, who do you report to. How big is the company?
VP, don't limit yourself based on titles.
It depends on the firm / size of firm. For reference, ours is $25B AUM shop. You will not be a VP based on your experience mentioned.
VP coming into to our shop is supposed to have experience negotiating legal docs and some broker/JV partner relationships already established. It looks like at a firm like ours, you'll fit in a Sr Associate/AVP role.
You sound like a Senior Associate. Able to comfortably lead underwriting & DD / IC process but not sufficiently experienced to document the transaction. You should still sim for a Junior VP role, 7 years experience is typical of a VP so should be able to land interviews for it. Lack of documentation experience may be an issue vs. other candidates but if you're open about it and other VPs and above are willing to support you on documentation until you have 2-3 deals done it'll be less of a problem.
So a lot of people will say you don’t have the experience yet to negotiate. But everyone goes through this transition period. Aim high - the worst that can happen is you end up lower.
Sure, you may not have negotiated legal docs before. But in reality, it isn’t that hard. You’ll learn as you go. And if you understand what you don’t know, you’ll ask questions. Much of negotiating a legal doc is intuitive and asking yourself can I agree to this or who on my team do I need to confer with on if I can agree to this. As the deal person, you take care of the business points and than pull lawyers, construction people, etc., in for points where their expertise is needed.
Depends on the shop and processes set up. Start grabbing coffee with brokers and other parties you think you can source deals from, and share with your boss deals that look interesting to you. If you are in a collegial environment and leadership wants to see you succeed, they will appreciate you are going above and beyond than doing your role on paper to get the promo. If you are doing advanced financial JV modelling, that means you are reading loan and JV docs to know what some important points are to your shop. You have lawyers that create the docs and put things in writing so JV agreements come down to how painful the JV partners want to make it. There are idiots with director or VP titles who don't have a clue. If you are at a shop with a programmatic JV agreement, it also makes it easier as you probably work with a handful of select equity shops and the process is somewhat stream lined. It gets more challenging when you are working with a brand new LP that might want to negotiate BS in the docs which very senior folks would be involved in. As some folks have said, don't sell yourself short. All comes down to leadership and what they expect and want from you!
Titles in real estate are bonkers.... some use the "traditional" corp structure of Analyst/Associate --> Manager --> Director --> VP -->SVP/EVP --> C-level, while others use the "banking" structure (which really makes no sense tbh..) that is where VP is in place of manager, and ahead of Director --> MD, etc. All can have "senior" added to make someone feel extra special!
So, use the "years of exp" as the general guide. But, in general, I'd agree with above people saying to aim high, firms will often "level set" as they interview anyway (meaning, if you apply for VP but fit as Sr. Associate, they can just offer you that if they want to). Can apply "lower" as well if you think that it still fits you correctly. Either way, don't let the fact that our industry has made a joke out of ranks/titles (ahem... CBRE with your bullshit "chairman" title) get in your way!!!
Depends entirely on the firm. Titles are misleading. You can easily be a VP at say a smaller organized shop but based on experience, for my large institutional shop, 7 years is no where near the experience for a Director/VP level (Director and VP titles at my shop are basically the same)
You're a VP and you should tell people you are interviewing to be a VP. All of this is shop dependent. I was at a shop where it was only the MDs negotiating any docs, means nothing. The titles are representative of your grasp of what's going on, your ability to get deals done and your critical thinking towards a deal. As a first year VP at a new shop nobody will let you negotiate docs solo, and you can always lean on the idea that you want to understand the hot buttons for your new shop (each place has a different view on willingness on major decisions, guarantees, promotes, structure, etc.)
also, good external counsel (and maybe even internal if your group has it) are an awesome resource for learning the ins and outs and can help frame potential options on biz issues. really helps the learning curve
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