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A while ago my mentor told me that three people that make the most money in real estate are top REPE, development professionals and then the last one might suprise you, its office leasing brokers. A small % of them are making a killing that they can be in the top 3 highly paid real estate professionals in several markets.
Can confirm 3. I met an office leasing guy at my brokerage that said he cleared 7 figs.
Sorry for the ignorance but what is office leasing?
Leasing office space
Second this. Top brokers make a killing, along with being at a developer or PERE where you have carry these three take the cake.
He’s specifically talking about office leasing - not I-sales
Office Leasing brokers def do really well. That being said I know several Investment Sales, and Debt Brokers who easily clear 7 figures so there is no doubt all three can be quite lucrative.
Unless you work for yourself for the first two, I feel like brokerage is #1
Plenty of Ds / MDs / SMDs at top developers with considerable equity stakes in large deals ($100m+ GDV) and stable salaries.
Regardless of your choice of the above, they all come down to working for yourself. No one is going to pay you more for what you do, than you.
I don't know how you could ever determine this decisively. Obviously owning or running your own shop, whether that's a brokerage shop, a development shop, or a private equity shop, is how you make the most, and obviously very few people get to the point of owning their own shop, even fewer succeed, and even fewer succeed so dramatically that they get into the stratosphere.
For someone looking to get into the business, the most important thing is following the route that is interesting to you and that you're good at. That is the best way to find success, which is the best way to make a ton of money.
Yes, the second part of this is not something you should underweight. As dumb as it sounds, when you're genuinely passionate about something, you'll be willing to put in ALL the hours it takes to make it work and naturally become one of the best people at whatever it is you're passionate about.
I'm sure we all know that "one" guy with a weirdly niche job making like $800k a year doing something absurd but it's usually the result of being obsessively passionate about something which leads to being the best and the top 1% can always charge much much much more for a skill than anyone else. Like... THE underwater basket weaver is much better than being an average X.
Also if it matters, you'll probably be happier optimizing for work you enjoy VS making money.
Touching on his first point, running your own business is great too because you don't really need to succeed too hard to make much more money than you would working for others, especially in something as sweaty/eat what you kill as RE. If you're cool with feeling anxious as fuck all the time and risking your net worth then do it. You'll learn a lot even if you fail and build up a ton of full circle experience. Like Aristotle said, "#yolo ur life savings lOL."
Highest personal income = own a sponsor that promotes LP capital.
If you hit a home run deal with the appropriate waterfall, you could be looking at 10x your money.
Do Sponsors typically pay carry/promote like REPE does?
I've seen 30x. Sky is the limit on homeruns
Be a 90/10 or 95/5 developer that hits your promote hurdles
Yeah... I'm biased but I gotta think that having a meaningful piece of the promote at a development shop, which means being a partner, is the easiest way to hit that "stratospheric" wealth, like high 8 figures of net worth.
Being an office broker is great, and I've also heard they make a killing. And while making 3-4 million a year is fucking awesome, the real money in RE is in owning the actual bricks.
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