Most coveted seat in CRE
I know it is highly dependent on your goals and aspirations along with what you are good at. Other than having your own dev shop what would you say is the most sought after position? (bx REPE, Eastdil M&A team, Hines, etc...) Obviously it is extremely person to person dependent as all of those are extremely different roles but I was just curious on opinions.
CEO or regional head of a major firm pays well. Amusingly, at that point, you’re also essentially doing your own deals.
You want to be in the driver’s seat whether or not you built the car yourself or rose through the ranks and were hand-selected to drive it.
Also nice to have big company resources and less personal skin in the game.
Making enough money to have your own family office?
Probably not a sell side role, though I guess it takes all types...
Bringing in 7 figures to answer the phone and golf 3 days a week sounds pretty nice
How many brokers actually have this lifestyle tho? Genuinely curious.
Bringing in 8 figures to do the same sounds 10x better.
Some people are cut out for brokerage, or sales roles (and yes, banking and advisory is a sales role), and will be very happy and make lots of money doing that.
However, in real estate, the real money is on the ownership/development side of the table. Comparing the highest paid sell side folks to a 24 year old portfolio manager is fundamentally dishonest. If you look at people at similar places on the pyramid, the person on the ownership side will make substantially more than the sell side professional. In some cases, orders of magnitude more.
Probably Group Head/Managing Partner at a true LP/Pension Fund/Capital Allocator. You’re not grinding for deals like brokers and acquisition guys are. You’re likely not working 60+ hours a week. Everyone is just asking you for money and kissing your ass. And you’re probably still making very good change as the guy in charge at one of these groups.
What would you say are some true LP/Capital Allocators
CALpers, Texas Teachers, Endowments for big name schools like Harvard, etc.., CPP, GIC (although they do direct JV investments as well), ADIA….Basically any top sovereign wealth fund or pension fund.
I think these guys make less than you probably realize.
Junior to mid level definitely. But would have to assume the main lead at any of these places is doing pretty well. And seems like such an easy gig (relatively) just based on previous interactions and experience.
becoming thestripmallguy
Hines being on this list is kind of insane as somebody in the development industry. There are places where you can make way more money, not have to go through the IC dog and pony show for every deal, be able to take meaningful entitlement risk, and generally not deal with the corporate BS of a giant company. Goes to show how much sway brand name has over people still in school.
Agree. Makes no sense why you’d want to be at a Hines or Tishman beyond your first job
1) my own firm and use my own money. No partners or any bullshit
2) my own firm and use OPM
3) see 1) but I work for that guy and I’m heavily invested in the deals myself
If not above and I have to work for corporate world— I don’t care really it’s all same. massive comp and support staff and some say on buying/selling I guess.
I work at a family office that does #1 and it's amazing. They are prepared to put all the equity in themselves but will go out for friends and family money/co-invest if convenient. Makes life so much easier. No IC meetings, no bullshit LP reports, no begging for permission. We just decide what we want and go do it.
as do I. It’s why two of my first 3 picks are doing it myself or being the second guy at one. I love my job.
With the right mentality (trying to add value and make money versus preserving wealth) it is the best set up for RE in my opinion.
Yeah, Eastdil, the brokerage, is the most coveted CRE seat. No further comments.
You mean ‘real estate investment bank’?
In NYC. Not in other markets
An investment role for a major pension fund with a flexible mandate across strategies, access to sizeable capital, and broad coverage across geographies.
A company where I go home at 5 every day (most days) so that I have time to work on my own deals at night.
This answer wins.
I like this. Except you probably staying up to 2am to work on your own things.
Cardone Capital
I hear @Ozymandia always saying the folks who take the risk make the big bucks and the folks who don’t don’t. I think it isn’t always the case. I don’t believe in seeing the world as so linear.
If there’s anything CRE should teach you in life is positioning, which is the abstract of “location, location, location.”
There have been times when I took no personal risk, gave up some corporate balance sheet risk (house money), and due to how good the opportunity and timing was, split the upside with folks who wanted in and it was their role to take the risk and provide pursuit capital (I brought potential LP’s/PropCo investors so that helped balance things out especially when you sell the long term relationship and multiple deals and growth). An asymmetrical upside with limited downside.
People/Partnership risk is another story.
The best role in CRE besides being retired and working for fun, is being at the intersection of this risk return dynamic and finding these windows of opportunity - in CRE but also anything that interests you and positioning yourself for something good. It’s not fun or desirable for me to play the game traditionally.
You fight for your time to be able to think of postioning for your own long term benefit. You fight with your employer’s demands, your time wasting habits. Being able to position yourself right takes years and you aim for the future opportunity where the world comes to you. You don’t chase. There’s a lot of serendipity involved too.
Being able to be creative and act on it is something not mentioned too much on WSO, but it’s what gives me a lot of job and life satisfaction. That’s the best role, besides retired and having fun.
I mean, there are probably some exceptions to prove the rule.
Take your example. You're looking at it from your perspective. But your partners in that opportunity put up risk dollars and presumably got a huge amount of upside for doing nothing but put up risk. Risk got paid.
Thanks Ozy. There are sometimes exceptions to be found.
The dream job is being my first boss from when I was in brokerage - he worked on sick hotel deals, made a fat fee and usually rolled some portion if not all of it of it into the deal. So he conjured money from thin air, and became and equity investor in the deal in one swoop, while also cashing out fun money at the closing table and not doing any of the actual brutal eternal heavy lifting on the equity side. Rinse and repeat in perpetuity. He lives in a mountain town, skis during the day and raises his kids in a monster house. Is he the norm? Fuck no. But we're talking about the dream and this is one version of my dream. Ozy will hate this but yeah he's essentially getting the best of all world with basically no risk.
Tertiary market investment sales. No one knows the difference between cash & accrual accounting. Deals change hands through the same old boys and occasionally the city slicker you can rip off (they think it's really cheap). You can live on a ranch/low cost of living. Only problem is that these markets can only support a handful of brokers.
Genuinely can’t tell if you’re joking or not
Mainly joking haha. But, it doesn't sound bad for the right person?
I've delt with people trying to buy in these markets and realized that these brokers have a stranglehold on deal flow. Also, I've seen them completely lie about financials clearly produced out of PM software being edited & missing economic vacancy line items. Or insisting that having the utilities, taxes, and insurance expenses in only a couple periods is somehow still accrual basis (multifamily).
pretty silly question - the obvious answer is just having your own RE, making tons of money, and not having to work much. I think besides a few of the hardos out there, most of us could care less to have a fancy title and wear a tucked-in shirt all day.
You're not really describing a job or a role.
What's the best job? Oh, a guy who sold his company for $10B cash.
The entire point of this thread seems to be what is the best job other than what you just described here. It says it right in the original post.
Surprised CIO hasn’t been mentioned yet.
Is being the #2 or #3 person in a company the most coveted role?
I didn’t know we were just playing captain obvious and naming CEO or Managing Partner…
My own firm and use OPM.
This is a very nice spot where if you want to make solid six figures (ie - $200-600k). There is a significant number of deals that you can do in the 4-20 unit multifamily range at sub-$10M investments. You use OPM for the equity and take out a standard mortgage, charge standard fees, and have a full-service property management company run the properties. With this type of structure, you wouldn't need any employees. You'd be able to handle all of the work yourself. While the portfolio size will depend on where exactly you fall in this market, but this can very easily be done with a portfolio of 10-20 properties. That's not small, and not a trivial level of work to do, but that's not unreasonable either. That can very much be done by a moderately competent person that is reasonably motivated.
This definitely doesn't work everywhere, but in most areas in the country this is a very comfortable quality of life.
I feel like the hard part here is getting OPM (it's always the hard part but particularly so in the sandbox you're talking about). I like the idea of being able to do a solo venture running properties and sourcing deals - that's all manageable.
Even with a strong institutional background and solid investment thesis, how are you finding these equity investments in the $1m-$4m range? Who is trusting you to take their $500k and go run a 10 unit apartment complex with it when they could just buy their own couple of SFR's or stick it into S&P and get a 10%+ return?
Genuinely wondering how you pitch and position your platform as a new operator running in a small playground, and actually get equity investments at a large enough scale to make that $200k-$600k/year you're talking about.
(1) This is a very nice range to be raising equity. However, it is very different than raising big-money funds. The target market is very different.
At this level, you are generally looking for an investor group that can invest $100-500k per investment. While there are some institution and institution-like funds such as Wisconsin's Real Estate Alumni Association's student-led fund (I say as an alumni) that play in this space, HNW individuals tend to be the best source of equity capital here. People who just want a return they don't have to work for. There are a lot of these types of people, especially when you can position the investment as a way to do something for the local community.
(2) "... when they could just buy their own couple of SFR's or stick it into S&P and get a 10%+ return?"
(a) Because the investor can get equal or better returns than SFRs and can do so without having to put in the work of actually running/overseeing/managing the project.
(b) Why invest in real estate at all if you can earn S&P returns? No one should be investing in real estate then.
I'd love to have a career like Ray Washburne. I don't know him, but from the outside it looks like he does interesting deals, has a large impact in his community (Dallas) and is having alot of fun.
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