Are we suckers?
Most of us make good money, not great money, and generally have an in-office requirement of 4-5 days, with moderate job security in this market.
I have friends in tech / fintech making $200k+ while working from their couch or the beach with 0 in-office requirement and probably the same amount of job security. Also 5x better job perks
This has been the case for years. I initially thought the wfh / comp balance for tech workers would be short lived, but boy am I wrong.
Are we just fuckin suckers at this point?
Thoughts ?
del
RE pays sh*t and has always paid sh*t. Its the potential for future upside why youre in it. The problem is lately...getting that upside and the chance of achieving it.
I know several people in Director of Acq, VP, etc. roles that don't own any real estate at all despite them thinking since they were analysts that they eventually would. On the flip side, I know a bunch of people who don't know how to use excel and own $50M+ of assets.
At some point it's having the money and taking the risk. There are Associates or VPs only making a few hundred k all in after 5-6 years of working and others making less.
The issue is if you don't come from a family with money, you really have to work hard to make $500k by the time you're 35-40 and with a family/kids you probably can't save as much to buy commercial property which even on the low end requires millions of dollars. I also think the fund route isn't the best because you're putting in so little $/but need to show meaningful commitment and it seems with funds people just buy bad deals eventually to close out. Look at big to smaller firms like PGIM, Savana, etc which have done well but also got hosed on many deals in funds and probably only cared about the fees at some point instead of the actual deal.
Also, they try to make it so complex. Had a professor that worked for PGIM that wanted to separate out cashflows and formulate all these metrics meanwhile another family built their business from scratch trimming multifamily properties and are worth $100mm+ easily and have never touched any detailed analysis like that. It's real estate, not rocket science. It may be hard to find deals, but submarket is important, rents below market, can you buy at a good basis, and safe rent growth assumptions. Not all of these complex arrangements for sub $100mm deals to make it work and get your fees.
You don't need money to build wealth with RE. You can buy a 2-4 unit with only about 15K. The reality you don't want suffer to grow. Money is not the problem for someone working in RE even as an analyst.
Yes.
what are you friends doing in tech/fintech.... asking for a friend
Make the move to REGAL IB. Best thing I’ve ever done. You work slightly more for double the pay at the junior level. Like any top broker/equity/CMBS role at the junior level will work the hell out of you and you get paid less than REIB. Or just try to do investment banking in general if you don’t care about real estate that much. Much more optionally and higher pay
How did you make that switch?
Yeah did you have to go to bschool? I heard banks only hire out of bschool for anyone not immediate out of undergrad
Can you DM
No idea where you moved from or if you had prior finance experience but these are two completely different fields and it’s not an easy switch.
As someone who has been lurking here for about a year I can't help but wonder if there's the same volume of doom and gloom "RE is ass" type posts in a bull market.
This. Cream rises to the top boys. If you are good, you will get paid. If you are trash and have an entitled attitude you will fester in mediocrity. Own it.
This goes for any industry on earth
Naw, plus the ppl complaining about pay work at random operators and not legit investment firms
Been in the industry a few years now (ignore title), and I feel like if you’re not in REPE at a big shop or in a solid RE IB group, then the upside is limited. Make the move to PE or IB if you’re looking for better comp and better career progression overall.
Yup have been at small firms and seems its the whole pay you undermarket, with opportunity to grow but that usually isn't there and they give you carry as incentive but again have the control over exercising it.
Fintech isn't secure by any means; the difference is you'll make 350k a year after a couple of YOE, aka 2. But they'll do massive layoffs and transition over to newer employees. You'll end up having shitty Wlb for a bit, or you'll be let go, go somewhere quickly with worse pay, and then have to interview to go somewhere that pays comparably. You can make far more, but the turnover is insane. Most of the grads from my Masters's program have made killer money but at 4-5 different places, with time off here and there. They have freedom and good pay and work from wherever, but they must constantly interview. However, the severance is pretty great. I mean, Affirm is always hiring for FP&A and pays for junior analysts like 150-175 plus WFH. But they just laid off what 1500 people last year. It's a different lifestyle and very few make it to the top rungs at the FANNGs or big Fintech firms out there, making the MM a year. Now I've met moronic brokers making that in CRE or Commodities traders making that and they have a GED. However, that is fading out. Some people can make that on a trading floor easily if they are good at sales and take some higher level Tech certs.
Do you have the skills or experience to be in tech? Why not complain that you aren't a CEO of a F500 company?
RE pays plenty well. Someone is always going to make more than you, work less hard, seemingly be doing way better. That's life. You have better job security than your friends in tech. If you don't want to be in the office 5 days a week, negotiate that with your boss.
I just don't understand this mentality. If you aren't happy, and would rather be in tech, go work in tech! If your entire goal in life is to maximize your earnings as a 27 year old then no shit you're in the wrong business. If you have longer term plans or are interested in the work you do beyond what you get compensated for doing it, then why bother making the comparison in the first place?
OP, go read current Reddits on being laid-off. The lion's share of posters (although obviously anecdotal) are people working exactly in those types of tech/ftech jobs. The grass is not greener.
del
Didn’t BOA just laugh if a bunch of people and UBS. They are pretty correlated.
No, because I did my homework and knew that early career pay lags behind the flashier industries.
I just want to point out that there are quite a few brokers that make $200k on an "average/ok" year and up to $1mil on an incredible year. They work from home whenever they want, have no in-office requirement, and their job security is basically linked to the market - not their employer. It takes years to get to that point though. You will not make $200k as a broker first year out of college - unlike tech. Rather, in CRE, it's all about building up relationships over years and you can easily continue being a broker until you're like 75 since it's mainly just talking and meeting with people. Whereas, I doubt you will find someone who's 70+ working in tech since it changes so fast. By the time you're 50 in tech, you're old. You have to constantly keep up with new tech advances that are only accelerating faster and faster. By 2050, everything you learned in 2024 is useless. Whereas in CRE, time in the industry is the biggest advantage. In tech, it works against you and you get phased out.
I was curious so I looked this up. Here are the median ages at a few tech companies:
What sticks out? IBM and Oracle have much older median ages. And guess what? Both of those companies are viewed as being way behind technologically and very antiquated. IBM lost the biggest lead in tech ever seen. Tech companies know that younger talent = more innovative. Older employees drag them down.
As additional context, according to the internet, average age at CBRE and JLL is 40+. Going back to tech, 60% of Google's employees are 20-30 years old. So I really think we should factor in how long you can realistically make tech salaries into the equation. I don't think you'll be making a fat tech salary when you're 60.
But what about doing tech from 22-30 and then using the money you saved up to transition into real estate?? 🧐 I have a friend who is management level engineer at Meta and started there in the early years of Facebook. He got a ton of stock options and used that money to build a real estate portfolio
Since I live in the Bay Area, I come across folks with interesting sayings. This one reminds me of your comment.
In real estate, you spend $100 to make $5.
In tech, you spend $5 to make $100.
I have friends who picked the right tech company to work at, with good exits or comp. And I have friends who are on their 4th company because the other places shutdown. I have a friend whose company IPO’d and then the stock tanked and he didn’t sell (going through a high and low emotionally). There is a lot of luck involved.
Making millions from 22 - 30 is an outcome, but not sure that should be the plan.
Yes but could you land one of those jobs. Even those guys could say “ dang, I could have started my own company and be Elon musk right now with billions
Almost nobody I know in RE has the right natural disposition to do well in tech and vice versa.
Yeah you can go to tech and be coasty, but I think most RE guys I know would be be pretty depressed doing that.
Also off the top of my head, the last few REPE funds I've invested in have been people with some sort of "normal" RE progression that eventually started doing their own deals. They are small funds which is how I'm in an LP, but they've done well and they care about not losing money.
Just play in a space you enjoy, and the money will figure itself out. It's not like RE hasn't produced a crazy amount of self made rich people :)
"Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit."
Hope you can say this when it's your time
Have you not seen the layoff news in the tech industry ??? Even now the layoff hasn’t stopped. Plenty of tech people get kicked out of US, plenty of roles get outsourced to India / Mexico. Those people don’t make noise on social media, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
And the growth is capped. In a top tech institution, less than 3% people are L7+ and L7 only make 600k and often times are 45+ years old. In any high finance career, you’ll make 60k at age 29 and then easily scale into several millions, or even 8 figure, when you’re 45.
And empire building is a huge issue. Do you think those guys want to coast ? They actually want to spend 80 hours on exciting projects, only that they don’t have any real projects to do because they’re hired for the empire-building scheme that the evil managers have planned !!! They’re hired to be a useless cog in a large corporate and TBH it’s a sad thing to NOT have anything worthwhile to work on when you’re young and ambitious.
Yes they are making 200k now, but they will lose their job ANY time when another crazy Elon enters the board, or when their managers stops the empire building, or when product manager / consulting team decides that they’re no longer needed. They’re never invited to high-level strategy / executive meetings and they are ALWAYS outsiders. And guess what ? In ten years they may still be making inflation-equivalent-of-200k and not progressing in career.
You can’t have everything. If you want to be elite and top earner and alpha male, you gotta grind. You don’t become successful / leader / executive by spending your youth on a beach. And the 50k difference in entry-level pay is a rounding error if you look at your entire career
"If you want to be an alpha male, you have to grind"
What the hell?
Yeah, spotted the Grant Cardone... anyone who uses "alpha male" describing themselves or something to aspire to is definitely not and never will be an alpha male, whatever that means.
pretty much anybody can do your job, whereas only a small percentage of people can do tech and fintech, so obviously their comp and lifestyle should be much better than yours
you say this as a consultant?
yes. everybody can do my job too. that's why I get paid less and get treated worse than people in tech and fintech.
No, you're not a sucker, you just need to be patient. Junior pay isn't great because frankly, you don't add much value. There are tons of people out there who can replace you. Modeling isn't some highly unique skill. It's just table stakes for any dev/investment job. Your value comes once you have experience and a network, which doesn't meaningfully exist at age 25.
I realize that's not helpful advice for 99% of young people on WSO, but the reality is that the money takes time. You need to put in the effort and prove your value. If you do that, you can expect to earn serious money in your mid-late career years. I'm talking 7 figures/year. And many are able to do that as a W2, while not personally guaranteeing any loans. Who on earth has that kind of opportunity? Sounds too good to be true, but there's plenty of Principal/MD types doing it.
If you want to earn marginally more money at a junior level, go work in IB. Sure, you'll make a bit more money, but it won't be enough to change your lifestyle by much. It will also come at the cost of free time, and ability to pursue opportunities outside of work. You'll probably realize after 2-3 years its not worth it, and want to get into the principal side. At this point though, you're less valuable to an investor than someone who just stayed the course to begin with, and that extra 200k you earned in IB won't matter because you'll be starting at the bottom rung, and the other guy your age will be a level or two above you. Just my $.02 from working in this industry for nearly 10 years.
But how many in RE actually make it to those roles? The risk is in being 55 yo making 120k a year in a random RE role while you could've just stacked cash earlier in a higher paying industry and benefitted from compounding all these years.
We all get sold this "work for cheap now, enjoy the upside later", but that later doesn't always (and probably rarely) ever comes for most, especially with so many smart and crafty people in real estate competing for those few positions. I'm still super early in my career, but this whole "bigger upside" thing smells like BS to me, unless you're lucky.
It can easily be 100%. The problem is that people who don't have the balls to take risks get into RE then complain about the pay.
You’re not just going to wake up one day at 55 and be in a position where you’re stuck making $120k. If you have a halfway decent resume, you should be earning more than that fairly early on in your career (3-5 year’s experience). I do not know of a single company that exists who pays someone with 30 years of experience in a deal role (AM, acq, dev, capital mkts) $120k a year.
If you aren’t satisfied with your comp once you’ve worked long enough to develop a skill set and provide value, then it’s on you to either a) negotiate a higher comp package at your firm, or b) leave for another opportunity that compensates you fairly. Don’t be that guy who refuses to take responsibility for all the career missteps they’ve made.
Depends on the people.
Real estate is one of the few industries left where there is any sort of positive correlation between compensation and risk taking. There is no path in real estate to being handed 7 figures just for showing up, the way that kind of exists in IB or consulting. You need to actually take a risk to make big money; but once you're doing that, the sky is the limit on comp.
It also happens to be an industry in which deals play out over years and not days, so it doesn't really fit what the average WSO user wants, which isn't to make money, but to make lots of money extremely quickly. You don't find 30 year old RE guys worth $100mm in the same way you do in tech, because the industry is built on fundamental values and not vibes. You don't make the one giant trade that makes you generationally wealthy, like Soros shorting the pound or Paulson the subprime mortgage crisis. It takes time to build something that will last in real estate - being careful and slow in the beginning may mean missing out on a lot of growth, but it also means not going bust.
You can make $120k as a property manager or executive assistant in 2024.
No 55 year old is making $120k in a front office position.
Well-said. Nowadays these greedy babies want fat pay checks the first day outta school. Ain’t no good deal like that
For me, the appeal of real estate isn't to work at a company and climb the corporate ladder, but invest in real estate on my own and I'm not talking about building an empire. With the knowledge of real estate that I have now, even if I were to work my day to day job in a different field, I would still ultimately save my money to invest in real estate. Real estate is pretty much the only asset out there where you can leverage it to 75%-97% LTV and where that leverage is considered "normal." And as shitty as it sounds, it is one of the few assets that the government will not allow to significantly fall in value. As we saw in 2008, the government will do everything it can to prevent the housing market from crashing.
Now how can you make good money in real estate? Study your local real estate market and when you find something that you believe is undervalued or has a lot of potential, invest in it. My sister is not part of my family's real estate business and does not care about investing or being financially savvy. She and her husband do the typical 9-5 job and make decent money, nothing crazy, but enough to live a comfortable and stress-free life in a HCOL city. My parents encouraged her to buy an investment property in 2017 for $900k, which has netted her ~$2k/month. She cares so little about investing and making good financial decisions, that she didn't bother to refinance her investment property in 2021/2022 despite us encouraging her to. Well her 7/1 ARM is set to expire this year and her interest rate will double, so she is kind of forced to sell. We all thought she was kind of screwed because she is basically forced to sell at a time when interest rates are so high. To everyone's surprise, she ended up getting multiple offers around ~$1.5mm. My point is that when people talk about making money in real estate, it's rarely about making it to partner at a REPE/Dev shop. It's more so about making money from your own investments and that doesn't mean you need to go out as a developer or raise a fund. My sister has 0 understanding about high finance/real estate finance and barely did anything to make that $600k (not including the positive cash flow she netted for years), but now with the proceeds from that 1 good investment, she can redeploy those funds into 2-3 more investment properties and do it all over again.
For me, as I've posted here many times before, if I didn't have my family's capital, but still had the knowledge that I do now, I would play the entitlement game i.e. buy a property that I could afford to live in myself or can break even on its expenses once rented, entitle it, and if I can't finance the construction, then sell it with the entitlements. I've posted about one deal here: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/real-estate/those-of-you-who-have…. But I was just looking at another one 2 days ago. It was a triplex sitting on a 10,000 SF lot which is a pretty sizable lot where I live, asking $1.6mm. Down the street are a mix of commercial and more triplexes and at the end of the street is a 40 unit, 5-story development. Given the context of the street, I recognize that this property has significant opportunity for zoning relief (FAR and occupancy relief). It also rents at $8k/month, which doesn't cover all the cost of carry, but covers about 75% of it. I called my zoning attorney and he gave me the green light, but unfortunately as I was about to schedule a showing, the realtor informed me that they already accepted an offer...this property was on the market for less than 24hrs. I guarantee the buyer is a developer that recognized the same potential. There's currently another property for sale that employed this strategy. It is currently a duplex that is rented out and the developer entitled it for 7 units. They bought it for $900k and are asking $1.5mm. For those of you who work in development and understand your market's entitlement process, this can be a solid side hustle and the very first steps of going out on your own.
Tech seems to be going through a transformation right now. A lot of people in SaaS have been over earning and I believe this is starting to come to an end.
You are a sucker not for working in real estate and not tech/fintech but for working at a RE job that does not allow WFH flexibility or a $200K+ comp. There are ample opportunities at GSE’s and shops with Agency licenses, Life CO’s, etc that allow you to essentially coast, work 30-40 hours a week, have a $200K+ comp (base alone can be $175-200K+), WFH flexibility. There is stability, job security (atleast for the most part, no job will guarantee 100% stability), so not much to complain about.
I’m throwing the race card. What is the percentage of minorities at life cos and GSE? Outside of white women, the biggest recipient of diversity movements what are the percentage of minorities? With the closet Trumpers/Elons at these companies get your experience and figure out a way to do this on your own. As a minority find lung work stable work over 200k in CRE is damn near impossible. This is coming from someone who has made 200k plus and faced the “glass ceiling.” multiple times. So to minorities, yes you are a sucker if you think you fit in with these folks longterm. Get the knowledge and move on…
CRE is full of white men period but that being said when it comes to GSE’s or shops with Agency licenses, there are far more people of color than other CRE field. Can’t say the exact %, but this is a fact. Ever been to a Freddie or Fannie conference? That is the best place to see who works at GSE’s and at the agency shops and this can be proven out.
I'm not going to pretend that it isn't more difficult for minorities to get a foothold in commercial real estate, but come on man...this is dramatically overstating things.
I worked in Atlanta for 7-8 years. Tons of so called "Trumpers/Elons" in the industry, but also a ton of successful minority real estate professionals, and even more people who were just interested in making money and less in your personal politics or skin color.
Know any of these that are hiring?
Agree with this. Its counter intuitive because we're all in CRE, but theres still plenty of remote positions out there. A company in bumbleville Ohio realizes if they do a remote posting they get a better quality candidate nationwide.
It also makes a ton of sense if you develop at all in a variety of markets. I have deals in Atlanta, New York, and London. It does not matter whatsoever if my day to day is in an office or my couch, because I'm going to be flying for site visits either way.
Amen to this
Save up some $ and buy some real estate yourself. Or save up and put tha tmoney into index funds or try to raise a fund. I bought my first couple properties at 25 after saving up $50ish k
Depends on what firm/role
I went had a different options for analyst gigs coming from IBD and the base/bonus for re roles at banks/pe firms for example are just as much if not more than IBD/corporate pe and overall teams are more chill in RE. Ofc those aren’t “most” roles in RE but those 200k+ cushy tech jobs are not most tech jobs either. Those r ppl who got lucky w some top firm in terms of benefits
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