Few job postings for Verizon looking for Real Estate professionals. I originally glossed over it thinking it was mostly corporate asset management/strategy/office leasing etc. Now I'm thinking it might be more than that. Did some more digging and read a few articles that note a large sell-off of assets, especially their Texas HQ: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2016…
Does this mark a monumental shift in the overall industry converting or selling assets like retail/industrial to mixed-use or something else? Or is this a one off play by Verizon to just help offload the asset and secure some future cash flow? Think other blue chip/Fortune 500s that have massive campuses that could be redeveloped (GE, Amazon, Oracle, Dell etc.)
I could see how brokers/acquisitions (from the outside) would love a piece of this action, but what would that look like internally for skill sets gained if someone was working for Verizon in a transaction like that? Let's face it, they are a telecom giant, not a typical RE owner/operator/developer and probably lean on the brokers representing their sale to do the modeling/valuations?
Anyone who can chime in, thought it was an interesting thread to start. Any other weird asset conversions people have seen in the past few years that might become the norm in the future?
I saw this as well. I chuckled at the idea of Verizon looking for an Analyst with joint venture experience.
I saw the posting as well and confused by what the person in the position would actually be doing.
If you read the description carefully however, it still sounds like a “Corporate RE” gig.
Toyota's former HQ campus in Torrance traded relatively recently after they decided to relocate to Texas. It's going to be redeveloped as industrial product, but I know for a fact several of the next-in-line bidders had much more interesting plans in store, such as redeveloping it as a creative office campus with live/work multifamily and retail.
Their 2017 10k shows $627MM of real estate assets on their balance sheet. I figure with the capital intensive cost to build out a 5G network they are looking to raise cash where they can, and real estate could be a venue to do that.
Just thinking out loud, not sure one or two campus sales (full or partial interest) or $627mn of real estate on the balance sheet warrants a FT position for very long, especially if trying to dispose of the asset class as opposed to grow.
One thought, however, could this be linked to their corporate pension plan? I believe they have a pretty large enployee headcount and still have a Corp pension plan - if this is the case then perhaps they have a bunch of real estate AUM within the overall pension’s asset allocation. If they have a few billion and an operating model to do direct JVs as an LP or even invest via separate accounts (as opposed to allocating for a bunch of different funds) then they probably need an internal team to manage.. if this is the case, the gig could be pretty interesting.
I landed my cureent gig after finding a ‘weird’ job posting where i didn’t quite fully understand the role, operating model or how Big the real estate portfolio of the firm was but I ended up applying and following through with learning more and really like my gig. It’s not dissimilar to the situation I just described but not a pension plan - I work on a small team that oversees and controls investment decisions of a few billion allocated to real estate and get to travel all over the world looking at new markets , analyzing new strategies across markets, sectors, risk profiles, etc.
Moral of the story, do some more homework and even apply / interview if you can. Could be a great opp and a lot of competitors for the position could be scared off by it being a ‘weird’ posting
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