What is the career path for someone in CRE Asset Management look like? I know you start as an analyst, but what does this career path look like 10-20 years in, assuming you stay in it? Pay, hours, etc? Assume this is at a REIT or REPE firm, not a bank doing loan management. I've interviewed at a couple of places and have another one coming up and am interested in knowing more about the field, since it is often overshadowed by acquisitions.
Trending Content
Career Resources
It varies a lot by the fund's size, asset type, market focus, and strategy (see below). In general, you make anywhere between 50-75k with no to little bonus in the first couple of years. Hours are decent, most weeks are 40, some weeks are 50, very rare 60-hour weeks, may be just once or twice a year you work longer than that. Pay will rise to 100-150k with probably 10-25% bonus when you have 10 year of experience under your belt. Top/head asset managers make anywhere between 3-400k to low 7 figures.
Size: for funds with less than $1B AUM, acquisition and Asset Management or asset management and accounting functions are not that clear-cut. You may be hired as an asset management analyst and you will spend half of the time underwrite deals for the senior acquisition guys. Or if you are unfortunate, you will be spending a shit load of time with accounting stuff.
Asset type: I have known industrial managers who manage both east coast and west coast portfolios. On the other hand, many retail asset managers focus on just one super regional shopping centre. I think hours would not be significantly different. If I have to guess, for the same portfolio value, I say the retail guys will make more.
Location: Does the fund focus on 2-3 cities or a regional (in many case it is also just one asset type) or national or global? If is it just 2-3 cities or regional fund focusing on one asset type, as the fund scales up, you can enjoy a good ride with the fund (think if you work for an office fund focusing on NYC, as the fund grows, all money will be likely stay in NYC office, the portfolio you manage gets bigger and more bonus likely to follow).
Strategy: Is it a core fund or opportunistic fund? If it is an opportunistic fund, asset managers may not do direct asset management. My firm has an asset management team but given our strategy, we always partner with local managers (most of the time this is also the GPs in the projects). The asset management team in this case oversees and manages outside managers. This team also works on follow-up development (say we buy an industrial portfolio with lot of excess land, as the tenants roll, we can develop a new building for the tenants if they want to upgrade their space or expand). This team builds great relationship with many GPs and they are often the first contact for new deals. Their compensation is on par with acquisition team.
Generally speaking I feel like asset management has a bad rep on this forum and I'm not quite sure why. I understand the general notion of acquisitions being sexier, but at shops that truly segregate the two functions, AM is the one that leads to gaining more actual RE knowledge, by far. Additionally, it's never made complete sense to me how someone can credibly underwrite deals without having ever worked on the implementation of the business plans they're underwriting.