Hey guys - as an analyst and associate, what’s the breakdown of work at typical real estate shops? What percent of your time is underwriting new deals, putting together decks, etc. I currently spend 90% of my time underwriting, and it’s starting to feel a bit repetitive. What am I missing?
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In development it would be 25% or less, depending on how big the shop is and how siloed people are. Could be 5%.
How about on the acquisitions side?
Dev shop associate, hovers between 5-10% I would say most of the time. Can go up to higher % but not that frequently.
I don’t work on the acq side anymore but 75%+. That’s the job at its core
Work at a very large GP, 75% underwriting 25% spent doing more due diligence/ putting together memos for deals we wanna pursue / other random stuff
Thanks everyone, very helpful. Any advice on how to learn more and grow? I’m finding some aspects of underwriting to be a bit repetitive and more of rinse and repeat. Hoping to get more out of it.
I'm an Investment Analyst in a boutique shop. I would say that I spend 25% of my time underwriting, 20% making investment memos, 10% market research (tracking transactions, reading/writing research), 25% portfolio management, 10% investor relations and 10% capital raising.
I work one for one the largest REITS, and my team covers just one market along the West Coast and this year we will have deployed $987M.
We underwrite and look at everything. How else do you find a good deal if you don’t underwrite everything.
What asset class?
industrial
That...has nothing to do with OP's question though. He asked for a time breakdown, not a percentage of available deals breakdown.
60% UW/IC Memos, 20% Quarterly Reporting, 10% Golf, and 10% drinking.
On the Debt side, an analyst will spend 80-90% on UW / committee decks. 10%-20% is ad hoc projects/reporting BS with some travel sprinkled in. .
The advice that I would give is don't get too down that you're underwriting a lot off deals and not doing many. That's the name of the game right now. Where you can show some value is figuring out ways to aggregate and present the data of your underwritings in ways in which you can help develop strategies for undervalued assets or locations and show your team that you can both get in the weeds and also understand the big picture.
You’ll be more impressive if you come in and say this will never survive committee and I don’t think want to do a full UW from pipeline.
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