How to prepare for RE investing roles (and CRE)
Hey everyone,
Looking into real estate roles/real estate investing/CRE based roles at companies like quadreal, JLL, CBRE, Brookfield etc and am really confused on how to prepare for their interviews specifically if there are cases or technical questions because when I look online some people say there were like no technical questions others say they had a case study or technical questions.
Also in terms of studying for technical questions I know for jobs like IB they have their BIWS guide but is there an equivalent for real estate investing roles/CRE where there is a guide that would pretty much contain everything I need to know for the interviews? Many people get BIWS and the Red Book etc for free so curious what I would need for resources to prepare for interviews and if the stuff is free.
Anything about your personal experience with similar companies, resources, or how RE interviews and process works would be greatly appreciated!
Also if it helps I am primarily looking into roles in Canada and UK area
Also REPE but I am assuming the LBO section of the BIWS guide would be most relevant?
On the interview side the reason why it is so confusing is because RE is much less standardized than IB. Some companies will mostly ask behavioral or easier technical questions (what is a cap rate, etc), while others have you build out models + put together investment memos alongside technical questions (most known names will ask you to model an acquisition or similar, ranging in complexity).
AFAIK similarly there isn't a guide in the same way IB has (or at least a readily known, free one). Almost no firms in RE will ask for LBO modeling (really only applies to REIB).
that makes sense thanks for the response! Do you have an idea on the difficulty of the modeling/case studies like would you be developing a full pro forma in acquisition or would it be something like a rent roll etc. also anywhere you recommend I go to learn some of those tech questions
break into CRE courses or Adventures in CRE cover a lot of diff models. Technical questions just watch youtube videos on CRE basics or do some google searching. The more complex questions will unfortunately be harder to do research about
Do you think free courses/resources are enough? For RE there seem to be a lot of paid things compared to other finance roles so I have only found some free things
I used realestateinterviewing dot com to prepare for repe interviews and found it really helpful for helping prepare for and find behavioral and technical questions. Definitely recommend it and it's worth the $20. I also used wallstreetprep for their real estate modeling course and think it worth it if you can afford it. I did a lot of the udemy modeling courses and WSP was noticeably better imo.
what were some of the questions like? did u see a lot of those in your interviews and do you think you could have learned them elsewhere
Chatgpt would be a good free resource that I would think could do same thing.
I would say biggest help was for practicing the mental math / irr questions. Also helpful for thinking through different investing frameworks and cap rates.
I studied real estate in college but I found it to be a helpful refresher on a lot of different topics.
Also, didn't realize that website was $150, I don't think I paid that much for it (hopefully). Wouldn't recommend for $150, ChatGPT could probably do a very similar job for the price.
Get your beer and golf game up. Cycling is big too.
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