Is NYU MSRE the right move for me
I'm currently a senior at a recognizable semi-target with a broad major in Markets and Culture, which provides a macro overview of global financial markets, and minors in Business, Advertising, and Economics.
I have worked every summer of my college career my freshman year at a recognized boutique multi family property management office in NYC, My sophomore year 3 months at a boutique IB bank on the M &A desk and two months at a boutique bank on their OTC desk and just finished my junior year internship at a top 3 corporate insurance brokerage on their property team.
I know I want to work in CRE and, long term, maybe pivot into RE PE, but I'm unsure if I will be able to land something without a specialized degree or hands-on experience in something of the nature investment sales. I've been consistently having 5-6 coffee chats a week and it seems to be the common theme that the only avenue that would be open to me out of college would be something like office or retail brokerage, and as I'm not completely sure what I want do I feel as if that is a very niche market and has low opportunity for a pivot later on.
Thoughts?
These programs are a waste of money. Period. Just apply to jobs and network.
EVERYONE is having trouble finding a job right now. People know the NYU MSRE is garbage.
I've seen multiple people take "entry level" analyst jobs with 3-5 years of decent experience and advanced degrees. Competition is tough out there. But agree with your point nonetheless.
If you want to do CRE finance, but aren't sure what you want to do specifically, then a great place to start would be investment sales, D/E Advisory, or valuation (appraisal). In all three of these roles you will see many different property types, markets, and various strategies of the sponsors. I would actually recommend 1.) D/E Advisory 2.) IS 3.) Valuations in that order. D/E Advisory and IS are quite similar; however, I am slightly partial towards D/E advisory because you need to have a good understanding of what the sponsor is looking for and a good understanding of what various financiers are looking for, which requires you to put yourself in their shoes. You also get exposes to different financing structures, whereas in IS, you're just looking to get the highest price for you client, so you can kind of just throw spaghetti against a wall and see who gives you the highest price. Valuations is a great place to start as well, but you don't really get much insight into the sponsor and your entire job is just doing valuation analysis (comps, DCF, etc..), which is a great skill set, but can get very tedious. However, I will say that one of my previous dev managers came from a valuation background and was a financial modeling wizard, which made her very valuable to the development team. She was more valuable than the SVP who got laid off.
As for NYU MSRE, if money is not an issue, then NYU MSRE can definitely help you land a solid CRE job. I will emphasize that the classes at NYU Schack are useless. You are there so that you can work internships (paid or unpaid) during the day and attend classes at night, although i barely attended any classes. 99% of the kids in Schack think that they are at Stern and think they will get the same looks. They all soon find out, to their dismay, that they are far from Stern. Lastly, make sure you can build a financial model from scratch with your eyes closed.
Agreed on all fronts here. I have first hand experience with everything posted above.
The market is really hard right now. Since you’re a junior in college - since you’ve entered college the market has been really tough. Getting jobs is hard. I have plenty of friends who were laid off in the last 4 years. You definitely don’t need an MSRE to get a job. What you should do is network network network. And taking job in brokerage is not niche - you can take a job as a salaried analyst on a brokerage team and than after 1-2 years move to what you want to do. And you might even decide you like brokerage.
Dollar-for-dollar, your money is better spent on a strong MBA than ~any~ (emphatically) RE master's degree. An MBA is significantly more versatile long-term (you may hate RE in reality or another opportunity and/or serious interest may arise where such segmentation in your education won’t be beneficial or may be prejudicial to you), and it has more recognized ingredients and a long track record of empirical results for employers.
For this direct question, the issues are cost which is not trivial and how you approach the degree strategically. The NYU MSRE raw cost is ~$120k+ and you need to put it upon yourself (not everyone has the wherewithal to bootstrap opportunities) to place two+ local, and solid nyc internships on your resume before final graduation 'and' network from within and externally towards your goal position while you are still in the program. There is no question if you do any practical research that this degree has definitely worked out very well for a ton of people over the years, but the likely silent meta-text is that they sourced and completed good internships (or had substantial family money to start a venture, had a family real estate company behind them from the outset, or attended the program while gainfully employed in the industry) and were intelligently working on their perm position well before graduating.
I respectfully disagree to an extent with this take. It all comes down to the individual, their scenario, and what they want to do in life. Prior to attending NYU's MSRE, I faced the same decision of whether to pursue an MSRE or an MBA and ultimately chose the MSRE. My reasons were as follows 1.) At the time I fresh out of college and hated my job. Typically top MBA programs like to see at least 2+ years of work experience. That would have required me to work for 1-2 more years at a job that I not only hated, but I knew would serve me no benefit in the future. That 1-2 years would have been wasted time. Ultimately, this was the most crucial piece in my decision to pursue an MSRE instead. I made the judgement call that 4 years (2 more years of working before MBA and 2 years of MBA) was not worth a top brand MBA and that is assuming I even get in. And even if I did get into a top MBA and graduated, by the time I finished and started working, I would be 27-28 years old, but only an associate 2.) I personally hate and suck at standardized tests. 3.) There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to do real estate for the rest of my career 4.) I had no desire to work at Blackstone or a similar firm. In hindsight, I made the right decision. I landed a role at a reputable MM REPE shop and another role at a top developer. Even if I had gone for an MBA instead, I would probably expect to obtain similar roles anyways. Perhaps I could have landed a role at an even more reputable REPE shop, but as for the developer, they are already one of the big boys
I got pretty decent roles after my MSRE, but the industry as a whole view MBAs better you have to admit. They definitely don't overlook the MSRE but I think i would do an MBA over MSRE if i can go back. But you are right- I was in the same position as you and doing acq/dev now at a reputable firm. I wouldn't have gotten that opportunity if i didn't get an MSRE
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