Corporate Real Estate Career Path
hi everyone! i'm currently interning in commercial real estate lending at a bank, and i'm exploring career paths in real estate. i recently got the opportunity to intern at a luxury retail brand's real estate team (e.g. prada, lvmh) and was wondering how is a real estate role within a luxury brand perceived in the industry? would it be considered a step sideways or even a downgrade from a finance role? and what kind of exit opportunities could it lead to long term?
It's just a different path. My wife has worked in corporate real estate for over a decade. Her career is not thought of by anyone either of us know as higher than or lower than mine. We don't compare "prestige."
There are two main differences really.
The first is that as a developer, I usually have 2-3 projects at one time. I handle them from conception through disposition and either know or have a handle on every single little detail about them. My wife, in comparison, handles literal thousands of projects at once. They don't have names; they have numbers. But she only handles two main elements of a project and one of the two is in conjunction with someone else who has a similarly limited focus. So while my career is an inch wide but a mile deep, hers is a mile wide but an inch deep. Again, nothing about one is better than the other. Just different.
Where it can get a little strange, if you care about these things, is that as an acquisitions or development professional at a real estate company, you are "front office." The fees you generate keep the lights on. The deal successes you deliver are how everyone gets paid. At a corporate gig, that isn't the case. Nike primarily makes money selling shoes, not through real estate fees. Chipotle sells burritos. Prada sells clothes and handbags. Real estate in a corporate setting can end up being more deferential to the real moneymakers as a result. But that's just an ego thing. No matter what route you take, you will always have to be deferential to someone, even as a principal of your own firm.
Your exit opportunities would be to jump to other brands, work for a big retail developer/owner or do your own retail deals, start your own private consulting for clients, or move up within the brand and expand outside of real estate.
Assuming the pay is the corporate standard?
I'm not trying to be rude - I have no idea what that means. Is there a corporate standard? If so, what is it?
While I get what you're saying and agree that obviously the real estate itself isn't generating the revenue, it is the primary conduit for those revenue streams and is probably treated as such. Especially for a luxury brand like LVMH where in-person sales is still the predominant sales channel.
You're saying "probably" and I'm speaking from personal knowledge. No one cares that if my wife didn't find new sites they wouldn't sell their product. They care about the people selling the product.
One of the funniest things about my wife's job is how the equivalent of a property manager—the on-site manager of a specific deal/store—has so much more power and stroke than a residential property manager has in the apartment world.
Corporate bends over backwards for store leaders and a not-insignificant amount of my wife's job is having to explain her actions to furious on-site personnel because every new store she adds will negatively impact their existing store, even if it's better for the greater company.
Meanwhile, if a property manager ever called me demanding that I explain why I'm developing a new apartment building in the same city as they one they're managing, I would fire them on the spot.
It depends what you're looking for. It's much more stable although usually will involve a lot of traveling. There will be capped upside but you could potentially get stock options. There will always be a need for it. These days seems like a better path than doing acquisitions
I think it sounds like a good place to be, frankly. It would be more stable and more 9-5 from what I’ve heard. Having said that, it’s also not going to come with upside as others have pointed out.
Corporate real estate can be very different depending what kind of company you’re at. At some companies you’ll be doing nothing but doing office/retail leasing work, whereas at some companies you’ll be working a job that is very similar to acquisitions and/or development. I work at a family office where the lines often get blurred between investment real estate and corporate real estate. The family I work for has always believed in owning ~100% of their own real estate for their operating companies, so the model isn’t all too different than how McDonald’s operates at a much larger scale. Blurring the lines between investment real estate and corporate real estate can be very beneficial. Most real estate investors who buy vacant buildings are usually underwriting considerable vacancy and money spent on brokerage commissions. If you are paying vacant building pricing and know immediately who you are going to put in there (one of your OpCo’s), then you just eliminated some of your biggest risks and expenses as a real estate investor buying a vacant building.
It can be a cushy and interesting career path, but it depends entirely on the company as said above. There’s a big difference in working at a company that is just mimicking their real estate footprint across markets. I think a firm who looks at real estate more strategically could be fun. Likes of an Apple. Or somewhere like a JNJ who is probably heavily understanding life science trends. Lifetime Fitness is another cool one that continues to expand. They own some real estate but moving towards more lease structures.
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