Real Estate Job Market - What's the Temp?
Have been looking to make a lateral transition in the institutional acquisition/asset management space for some time now (analyst/associate level). Turned down a few offers towards the end of last year think I could get something better, it feels like the opportunities are definitely a lot lighter now. Anyone feel the same?
I'm looking in a secondary market (think Dallas/Chicago) - but friends looking in gateway markets (SF/NY) are also saying the same.
What's going on? Would expect more activity given bonus season should have been paid out across the board.
As someone that paid close very attention to the job market over the past year while I was reading for my transition to the acquisitions side, I can confirm that the market has died down significantly at this point. I will caveat that I've stopped paying attention over the past few weeks since I started my new job.
What I saw last year was that between now and September, there were very few quality opportunities for analyst/associate roles. Starting in the fall and especially Q4/Q1 is when I saw the highest caliber and most coveted roles hit the market (whether through actual job posts or the grapevine).
If you think about the timing it makes sense. Most RE hiring is need-based, not structured like IB. Most people turn out of their roles at the end of the year or in Q1 after bonuses hit, so that's typically why the job market is busiest when employees are trying to backfill vacated roles. Important point regarding bonuses - this isn't IB - many firms (including my last one) paid out bonuses in December. Some firms are also just growing and filling new roles, but this also happens in the same time frame since budgets/business plans for the year are usually done in Q4-Q1.
TL:DR - temp is lukewarm at best and will likely remain this way until Q4. This is where the classic bird in hand reference that's thrown around here really applies to your situation. It's important to be selective with your hunt/offers, but don't hold out for the "perfect" job that might never come around. Initially, I wasn't super excited about the offer I just took and thought about passing, but I'm glad I didn't, because now that I'm here I see that the opportunity is top notch even though I had doubts from the outside. Best of luck and don't give up.
To expand on IRRelavant's point (and to be a little more hardline about it), there is only one market that you care about when underwriting a deal--the specific market that your Subject property is in. The rest of the information is just noise.
I'd also add that there aren't enough data points to conclude to an 18-year cycle. The real estate market crumbled in 2008/2009 for very specific reasons not related to a regular cycle. Same thing for the real estate market in the early 1990's--it crumbled for reasons not related to regular cycles. Go back 2 decades to the early 1970's and you have all kinds of fundamentals in the economy that impacted real estate--final death of gold standard, oil price shocks, stagflation, the Vietnam War, etc. The reality is, a specific market (i.e. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York) rises and falls with the balance of supply and demand.
You have to think about what is driving revenue right now. At this point in the cycle I don't think it is acquisitions. It's asset management - how do we drive value at the assets we own - it is portfolio management and research - how do we strategically position our portfolio at this point in the cycle, which assets do we dispose of, where do we deploy capital, how are we managing upcoming debt maturities. If you do an attribution analysis in 5 years for the past 5 years, you will see this is where a lot of the revenue came from...not from capital gains. So in my opinion that is where the jobs will be for the next year. And they are important jobs!
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