What do real estate investment bankers actually do?

The RE forum loves dumping on REIB, so I'm going to answer before someone with no REIB experience hops in.

To start, it depends on the type of bank you work for. Certain balance sheet banks with minimal advisory expertise almost exclusively lend (through credit facilities and term loans) to publicly and privately traded REITs and sell equity (through follow-on offerings and IPOs) for publicly traded REITs.

Groups that do advisory work (M&A, lead-left IPOs, Private Debt and Equity Deals) will do some of the stuff below. I believe most IBs will fall into this category. You'll know if they don't because you won't be able to read about any of their deals online::

• Sell Large Portfolios of real estate assets. Basically a glorified broker role. You're selling 10-50 apartment complexes instead of 2
• Raise JV Equity or structured equity for a portfolio of assets. Also a glorified broker role. An owner/operator will hire you to raise equity to close on a large group of assets or recap an existing group of assets they already own
• Raise entity level equity or structured equity. Also referred to as "platform deals". This is actual investment banking work. Private REITs and real estate operating companies will often sell a portion of their company (and give up a piece of the GP) in exchange for receiving a $XXXmm investment from a private equity fund, sovereign wealth fund or whatever. This has become a more popular way of investing in owner-operators. You typically will underwrite an initial portfolio of a few assets and have an understanding of what types of assets the pro forma company will acquire. The new investor often-times will "control" the company and be able to deny any acquisitions brought to them that they don't like. Then the investor exits through an IPO, portfolio sale, or recap.
• PIPEs: basically same as the above but it's a private investment into a publicly traded company. Usually these are more "structured equity" or mezz / pref type deals and less "control" of the company
• Take-private of public REITs. Basically selling an entire public REIT to REPE funds or other REITs. At the end of the day, it's not too different from selling any other portfolio. You just have to account for balance sheet items, change of control costs, the process of handing over the asset management responsibilities to the new owner, etc.
• Public to Public Mergers - only the biggest banks will typically work on these. Two large public REITs becoming one.
• Spin-Outs: Selling a portion of a company to the public markets. Basically Company A owns office in the NE and SE, but they decide the NE and SE portfolios would be worth more in the public markets if they traded separately. So they "spin out" the SE portfolio into a separate, publicly traded REIT. I believe CUZ did this.

Also the more boring stuff:

• Competing in pitches to win the above transactions
• Doing "market update" books. Aka "Hey, thinking about you, plz include me on your next follow-on offering ;)"
• Debt / Equity offerings for public REITs

The catch is, that you may get to work on 1-2 of the above advisory deals per year. Compared to working in other areas of real estate where you'll see deal after deal after deal. You will really get to know 1-2 companies and be involved in a complex transaction for each. The rest of the time you'll be pitching, doing follow-on offerings or debt deals, or texting REIT CEOs "You up? Thinking about your next follow-on ;)". You will likely be comped 50-100% more than the standard RE analyst, which is another part of the tradeoff.