Since Marcus & Millichap is known to be competent at representing both the seller and the principle (correct me if I'm wrong), why is it not considered to be one of the top brokerages to work for as an Investment Sales associate?
Is it because of the fact that they don't provide a base salary? If it wasn't for the lack of salary that they provide their entry-level asscoiates, wouldn't they be the best brokerage to work in for someone looking to learn?
I've heard that they don't deal with a lot of institutional clients so people see them as lesser to CBRE/JLL/CW
Yes and for the most part they do a lot of 1031 deals from my experience. However, the biggest thing I would take into consideration is the specific brokerage team you would be placed on under the M&M brand and how much business they do. That is going to have the biggest impact on your success. Being able to jump into a team doing a lot of deals is going to get you exposed to a lot more with better benefits. In that business, you eat what you kill and it is going to be much easier to close deals working through existing relationships from an existing team.
They are the equivalent of dog feces wrapped in aluminum foil. Some of the most immoral unethical scum you will ever come across in the RE business.
So I know four MM brokers that pull in all over a million a year.
Broker 1 - Former D4 football player who had a concussion injury. He graduated in Political Science.
Broker 2 - A former Toyota salesmen, who also sold residential real estate. He ended up doing commercial real estate. Guy is a serious talker and hustles like crazy. Probably makes 50 calls a day and is always on the road. He definitely has the used car salesmen vibe though.
Broker 3 - A former housewife who worked at a local RE shop selling houses in a small market. She also is a graduate of the prestigious Trump University (No joke)
Broker 4 - Former personal banker, fairly smart and a good guy, but probably wouldn't see him doing large institutional deals for HFF or JLL
this is fucking nuts. one of my favorite posts ever in the real estate forum.
What the fuck is D4 football?
For every successful, competent IS broker at M&M, there are dozens of inexperienced backstabbing scumbags that will lie to their coworkers and clients to get a deal done. You can't really blame them though, it's the culture there.
If you want to dive right into brokerage I would say M&M is the best at that. For comparison, I know from talking with the head of my city’s Cushman office that they do not hire cold callers. Their model is now 3 years as an Analyst before transitioning to an Associate Broker.
At M&M you will be cold calling all day to try and set up meetings with potential clients, when you finally get someone to bite and come in, more senior brokers kindly push you to the side and take over negotiations. From my perspective, that sounds like a terrible way to learn the business.
Everyone that I know that has worked at M&M has uniformly described the culture as a boiler-room, sink-or-swim atmosphere with very little collaboration or training. They will hire just about anyone, and at the entry level you are essentially a telemarketer. If you ever get a hold of a Marcus OM it throws out all the vibes I would be trying to avoid as a broker.
That said, while the guys I know who started there had to essentially re-learn real estate to get up to speed technically, the are phenominal on the phone and solid salesmen. If you had no other entry into the business and could claw your way through all the bullshit, it's better than nothing.
Region/City?
What role?
Do you have a draw?
Hows the training?
Culture?
My responses above are from my experience there as a broker. But I've been there long enough to see what life is like on the front-end (broker) or the back-end (analyst). I am not sure which part you want to know more about...
Heard the same about M&M pushing a high volume of outgoing sales calls. Also heard the same about being cut-throat.
This might shed some light on just how they operate:
Greysteel CEO (Ari Firoozabadi) left M&M after getting fed up with the cutthroat nature (heard from a person I know at Greysteel - who knows how much of that is an internal spin from Ari but I'm not here to argue that).
However, what's public is the fact that M&M sued Greysteel (Ari) once he left and lost on some pretty damning findings.
Key Judgments * Sanctions Marcus & Millichap for destruction of evidence: GRANTED. * Judgment dismissing Marcus & Millichap’s case: GRANTED. * Judgment finding Marcus & Millichap liable on counterclaims filed by Greysteel and Firoozabadi: GRANTED. * Court rules in favor of Greysteel/Firoozabadi and finds Marcus & Millichap liable for, among other thing, Defamation, Violation of the Lanham Act (federal statute), Tortious Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage, Breach of Contract, and Evidence Spoliation.
I'm sure some would argue that doesn't directly tie to being cutthroat and a high-volume sales environment, but not a great look for them.
Full court order here: https://mmlawsuit2.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/courts-amended-ruling_fi…
Judge's remarks are quite humorous.
I've heard from a friend that works there that one of the more senior guys in his office makes the younger guys wrestle for deals.
Secretaries in Manhattan office are hot. Mostly 8s and a couple 9s.
I've been working at Marcus for a few months now, obviously I don't have an immense amount of experience in the field but from what I can tell, most people on this thread don't really know what they're talking about. It's true that Marcus is an eat what you kill environment but how cutthroat it is amongst your peers is dependent completely on your team. In brokerage the national reputation of the firm doesn't matter, what does is what market you're in and what team you're on. The team I've been on is one of the top producers in the country and it definitely feels like a family. The question here is do you want to make a killing out of UG throwing yourself into the real world and getting experience right off the bat by grinding your ass off or do you want to have a safer job that may pay dividends in the long-run if you really stick with it but has a significantly slower day to day.
It very much sounds like other people know a lot more about it than you. You have a few months experience with one team in one market.
And saying the national reputation of your firm doesn't matter is absurd. Of course it matters. Of course other people operating under the same brand name as you will have some impact on your business. I know brokers I'll never buy from again. And I'll avoid those firms to the extent I can because the shit that went down happened under their banner. It wasn't M&M, but I'm sure there is someone out there who got screwed by a Marcus broker and it may very well become your problem some day.
You've definitely taken quite a few sips of the M&M koolaid. Coming from someone that is on the buy-side in acquisitions, I can promise you that the national reputation of the brokerage does in fact matter. I see 5-10 OMs a day, all from different brokerage teams, and across the board the deals and quality of the OMs I receive from the major houses (CBRE, JLL/HFF, Eastdil, C&W, Colliers) are night and day better than anything I receive from the smaller shops (NAI, M&M, Boutiques, etc). Sure, every once and a while M&M pulls down a deal that probably should've gone to CBRE or JLL, but that is rare. Half the time M&M is trying to sell me shit like a cold storage facility in a cave located in Bonner Springs, Kansas.
Besides the deals and OMs, the quality of the brokers is much better as well. There are a lot of good and bad brokers that work for the smaller shops, but that percentage goes way down with the bigger shops, and the median broker is substantially worse at M&M than any of the major shops.
For every M&M broker clearing a million, there are 50 on the buy-side that are also. Grinding your ass off cold calling people while sucking down on a draw and being subjected to what is essentially indentured servitude is not smart. Working for M&M, the skillset you'll learn will be parallel with that of a used car salesmen or life insurance/annuity peddler. You'll learn how to cold call people and have just enough surface level knowledge to sound like you know what you're talking about to an unsophisticated investor.