Investment Sales Insights
I know there's a lot of threads on this already, and I've read most if not all of them and I am still confused. If someone that works in investment sales as an analyst or broker, or has in the past, could share some insight that would be great. I'm very attracted to starting as an IS Analyst as I've read it is a great place to start in the industry and I would see a lot of deal flow with various assets. I've posted my background here a few times before but to those that don't know/forgot etc., I have a year left before graduation, and no relevant internships. I'm currently expanding my networking and learning CRE fundamentals and excel modeling.
It's going to be difficult to give concrete answers, because roles/responsibilities/team makeups/corporate structures/etc. change from company to company and even city to city. Essentially, investment sales is "the same exact thing as a commercial broker," or in my experience, a specialty among brokers. Back in my brokerage days, my office was split into the following "teams:" Office Landlord, Office Tenant/Corporate Services, Industrial, Retail, and Investment Sales. Our industrial and retail deal flow wasn't large enough to split landlord/tenant like our office deal flow was, and our investment sales practice wasn't large enough to split along product lines at all. That was at a flagship shop in a mid tier city. In larger cities, or even at CBRE in my city at the time (they were the largest; my company and another fought for second), they were more broken up and specialized.
Why "Investment Sales" is seen here and elsewhere as a higher tier or holy grail is that it is "closer" to the principal side and because some of your daily tasks (modeling deals) are a lot more transferable to the principal side. When I was an office broker, I was cold calling companies, giving tours, and convincing people to sign leases. That's much further from what I'm doing now, as a developer, than what my buddy in investment sales was doing.
It isn't any better or worse than leasing, although in my experience you make larger commissions but much further spread out, but it is arguably a better start if you're looking to be a broker for a year or two and then exit.
IS MF Analyst here, my modeling consists of DCF analyses of in-place apartment buildings (plus direct capitalization analyses of potential land sites & condo construction/conversions). We don't use Argus. It is all in our proprietary excel model. I work for one of the big firms (HFF, CBRE, JLL, etc.) in the Northeast and for a very successful broker in the space. We value a ton of properties. My job is to tee-up values for my broker and make edits based on his suggestions. I've been in this position for about a year now. In terms of exit-ops, previous analysts have gone on to the principal/developer side after 2/3+ years. HFF pushes analysts to become producers, but that takes years of experience. In my experience, many of the strong IS teams require some sort of real estate experience in order to be hired. Appraisal may suck, but it forces you to learn the fundamentals of a piece of real estate. One/two years of that would help you.