Remote Work
Has anyone seen any exclusively remote work positions pop up in CRE recently? Do you think this remote work trend will be more prevalent in the future for the real estate industry?
I'm an analyst at a multifamily owner/operator in Chicago and want nothing more than to get out of the city - reasons for leaving are various, but I think the city is heading in the complete wrong direction and I was born and raised in a much more rural area and want to get back to that.
But my interest in CRE remains and although I'm less worried about pay than I am about my quality of life, I don't want to take a massive step back/down in my career by moving to a rural area where in-person jobs like mine don't really exist for obvious reasons.
Short answer, I sure as hell hope so...
Longer answer, is there a distance you’d be comfortable commuting (when needed) or like 2-3 times a week instead of everyday.
Personal example from my end is, I work in CRE for a brokerage based out of Philadelphia...the commute is ~30min (I live in suburbs near the city). The next step for me is getting a job in NYC. Something I never would have considered before. Sure, it would be a 60-80min “commute” to NYC. But, that’s an easy trade off if I can keep it to 2 days in NYC and benefit (at least partially) from NYC’s higher pay scale. I actually sat down and did the math. Overall commute time would be near identical to what I’m doing right now as long as it’s only 2-3 days in the city and remainder WFH.
Consider this too. You might look like a bargain to city employers. Asking salary could be a “bit” lower than what an equivalent employee would need if they lived downtown. COL for you would be much lower so everyone could come out on top.
I know this has nothing to do with the post and I'm being very blunt but I'll ask anyway. Are you guys looking for an intern this summer?
Unlikely this year. We cut all interns last summer because of COVID. The consensus so far is that they won’t be back until summer 22’.
I doubt permanent remote work is something the industry will like. Too much of business still needs to situate itself in downtown areas or major metros for ease of networking and general in-person meetings. Maybe try a different metro/city that offers a different style of living if Chicago has problems you're not ok with? I can't see huge benefits to being rural or outside the office full-time, facetime is still important even with the boss and upper management.
To add to this, the product in real estate is, well, real and physical. I wouldn't be taking any cues from say tech or law where the thing you're working on is more abstract. I'm more bearish on the remote work "revolution" in general, and doubly so as it relates to our industry.
CRE firms will be the first ones back to the office once they are able
That said, you could probably find a remote analyst position just doing financial analysis / brokerage support work. I've seen those roles at JLL before
I sure hope not for the office guys out there.
If you're one of those Dallas located asset managers that everyone seems to be moving to I don't see why you couldn't do your job remotely, depending on your type of product.
Our company is going permanently remote. It wasn't planned like this either. There was a schedule of us coming back into work this year, but the company decided against it. A couple reasons why, for our acquisitions and AM team, the reality is that even if the office was open, only half are there. Many are doing site visits, tours, meeting clients, etc. The office really was just a place to print documents and what not. So now our company decided they were going to have a much smaller office space with flex seating. Meaning that there are multiple desks, but whoever wants to can come in and use them. We can print documents or come in if we need to. Someone above said we'd be the last industry to go remote, I have to disagree with this. It also depends on your firm. If you have people constantly traveling or out of the office, you really dont need a space. Some are saying office will die and we will all be remote, others are saying everything will be back to normal. My belief is that the future is going to be a mix of the two. Some companies may allow WFH on Fridays. I imagine offices will not shut down but rather scale down their sizes and have maybe a rotating desk system. This would save rent without reducing productivity. My two cents.
The model you’re describing wouldn’t allow OP to leave the city he’s based in. It just means you have to live there but no longer get your own office/desk.
If you are within a 2 hours commute but only have to go in twice a week and traveling the rest this absolutely changes things.
Same here. 20b+ AUM firm here. Rumors in the mill is saying we’re going office optional post covid. We also hired like 20 front office people since pandemic began (timing of growth initiatives) and half of them aint even in the city our HQ is. Im still bullish on CBD and all that jazz and will likely continue living downtown but the 5 days a week in office culture is long gone. Personally for me, office days are probably going to be sunny days when I feel like walking outside, forget about trekking through the rain and snow in my city. Employees for sure are going to shit on you if you enforce 5 days a week post covid. Its just useless facetime.
Experiencing something similar. The office is open but super quiet- well below 50% of pre-pandemic occupancy. I don't think the main driver is fear of COVID, although that's part of it. I think a lot of people like WFH and/or like skipping the commute. It turns out that a lot of the "important" weekly meetings we used to have can be conference calls or just eliminated. Business continues to get done. Boss is quietly putting out feelers to see if they can sublet half of the space. No takers yet.
One thing I'm loving is all of the remote municipal meetings. Think of all those nights developers had to spend waiting their turn to present to some city agency at 9PM on a Tuesday before a 30 minute trip home. Now that's turned into a Zoom call that you can listen to in the background while sitting on your couch, and you can just turn on your camera for fifteen minutes when it's your turn to go.
Would you mind sharing what company you work at? Thank you!
This has gotten kind of interesting in how split people actually are on this. Remote work full-time is not going to happen. There are too many collaborative aspects that are just more easily done in-person at one place. Phone calls, emails or video calling make communication better when distance is added in, but it won't fully replace the ease of direct communication. If I'm looking at something on my screen it's just easier to drag my MD out from his office 10 feet away and show him on the spot in 30 seconds what I'm having trouble with. Setting up a screen share or trying to explain it over the phone is not always easy to explain. There's far too many inconsistent connections or downtime people experience because of issues with power, internet, cell network, or equipment they can't fix.
Disagree with the last part. How often does the power go out or the internet cut out (if you're in the US or another advanced country)? Rarely. Cell service has gotten a lot better in the last few years; I use a budget carrier but almost never have dropped calls or poor call quality anymore. And computer problems can be fixed remotely. My company's IT is in another location and they work via remote access anyway. So they can do something to my home computer just as easily as they can to my work computer.
As to the collaboration: clearly something is lost in WFH. But this is a question of trade-offs, and WFH can net out to a better arrangement for a lot of people.
I think the median employee will still be a traditional office worker. But we're not going all the way back to the way things were.
It is true that downtime in service doesn't happen that frequently, but with it being winter, we've a had a handful go down over the last few weeks because of storms in their area that knocked out power utilities. In the Fall, our California group went down a couple of times because power was shut down intentionally due to wildfires. Even on a normal day with ideal conditions, I've seen people fall off calls because their wi-fi was going in and out, or their audio gets really garbled/delayed. Home wi-fi connections were not made to support so many devices at one time to stretch the bandwidth so much, especially for a family where a partner and/or kids needs to utilize remote services too.
IT groups can remotely diagnose and fix issues, but there are still physical setups that can influence why an employee may be having issues, and some people aren't talented enough to know how to actually fix it, i.e. rebooting their own internet.
These things are generally small, and it's not to say it didn't happen in the office, but it does add up.
What budget carrier do you use? I use tracfone
Real estate and tech are far from similar industries, but I think there are some parallels between the two when it comes to the adoption of full-time remote work with tech being a first-mover in the space (for obvious reasons).
In tech the adoption of remote work has already resulted in: a) much, much larger hiring pool to choose from without having to rely on those applicants that are willing to live and work in your city/area, b) at least in theory, higher quality hires as a result of so many more applicants, and c) the potential to get more bang for your buck by being able to pay a lower salary to your remote employee living in some secondary/tertiary market in the Midwest rather than your employee that has to live in San Fran, NYC, etc.
While some positions and people will always need that immediate face-to-face interaction in the office, I think it's inevitable that RE firms catch on and see that some more behind-the-scenes positions in asset management and supporting analysis work can easily be done remotely, and the trade-off between a lower salary and living/working from where you want to be is clearly of value to some subset of the industry.
why do you think chicago is headed in the wrong direction?
Population decline, violence, a completely irreversible debt issue, take your pick.
The point of crime is the biggest for me when thinking about living here over the long-term and raising a family. Large parts of the city are essentially a warzone, people don't feel safe anymore, couple that with the movement to defund the police and things are only getting worse. In 2020 there were more than 750 homicides and 3000+ shootings in cook county, if the US saw these numbers in the middle east we would put 10k troops in the area to restore stability. The city had 51 homicides in January this year, highest in four years. And while the vast majority of this activity is on the south side away from downtown I think it's inevitable it starts leaking into the rest of the city, someone was robbed at gun point in front of the Willis at 8am a couple weeks ago on a Tuesday. This leakage into the rest of the city is already starting imo, carjackings were up 283% in Jan 2021 compared to last year, and these are all over the place, the loop, lincoln park, lake view, you name it, cars are being stolen left and right. On one of the chicago police scanner twitter accounts someone joked that it was refreshing to see a post about a shooting because there had been so many carjacking tweets in a row.
And of course we saw huge portions of downtown and surrounding neighborhoods get crushed by the riots over the summer, yes they were riots. Many of those businesses that were vital to these communities aren't coming back either, no point in rebuilding your mom n pop grocery store knowing it can be robbed clean and possibly burned down because a mob was upset. The city would raise all bridges connecting the loop to the rest of the city overnight for weeks on end and place snowplows at intersections to prevent people from getting to the loop, just insanity. Going to dinner with your wife in the loop? Okay well make sure you evacuate the area by 7 o'clock or you'll be locked in for the evening.
I can't even begin on the debt issue, last I read we have more pension debt than 44 of the 50 states, and the most municipal debt per capita than literally any other city in the country. The issues with our county and city governance are too deep to get into with just a post here, but it likely won't be getting better anytime soon. And the continued population decline coupled with city taxes that will eventual cause employers to leave will crush what's left of the city's tax base.
Just rambling there but those are my thoughts, if anyone has a more optimistic view on the situation I'd love to hear it, maybe I'm just down on everything with covid, the weather, etc
Thanks for that, I was curious if you were referring to the Chicago real estate market. As a resident of the Northwest Suburbs I can agree and attest. Have had carjackings out here (~45 min from loop) quite recently. I remember the bridges being raised, and the police presence downtown is still absurd. Cop cars on every block.
so which firms are going full remote? I have a mix of acquisition/AM/I-sales experience and would love to find one of these fully remote jobs and live wherever
Also in Chicago, our leadership is very old school and has been pressuring everyone into office since covid started. Will make office 5 days/week mandatory the day its legal to do so. Just a data point - will probably cause people to leave tbh.
I understand your feelings. I have always dreamed of returning to live in the countryside where my parents live, but I wanted to earn a lot, so I moved to a big city early. It is a fairly widespread belief that the number of earnings in the countryside is much lower than in the city, but fortunately, this is not the case. Now you can work remotely, and with such online work, it doesn't matter where you are at the time of work. I found myself an online job and returned to my parents, now I earn a lot and live in pleasure next to my family, so I advise you to pay attention to the remote qa tester jobs. I also think that freelancing will only become more popular over time.
Nulla aspernatur vitae asperiores. Facere accusamus earum facere modi animi est cumque dolorem. Quia deserunt molestias libero culpa voluptate. Asperiores beatae ut est aspernatur ut rerum ipsum. Mollitia reprehenderit ducimus est laboriosam necessitatibus nisi corrupti.
Ab mollitia asperiores quos asperiores quod veniam eum. Dolor corporis dolorem autem laudantium est. Dolorem possimus qui quis sit molestiae. Aut corporis rerum voluptas quibusdam. Qui accusantium adipisci ipsum iusto animi autem vel.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Tenetur repellendus quos et quam. Dicta sed fuga ex quibusdam corporis eos. Laudantium tempore cumque ipsam. Qui nihil minus itaque. Itaque sequi placeat exercitationem rerum et consequatur et.
Rerum omnis autem fugiat amet laudantium iure repudiandae natus. Et maiores quisquam sapiente placeat quia. Dolor sunt sed quia accusamus recusandae non mollitia.
Doloremque quia natus quasi vel. Quia consequuntur et minima quae cum. Placeat aspernatur nulla placeat cum. Eaque incidunt vel quis dignissimos ratione voluptates eius.