What to do in my CRE internship?

For context, I'm a rising sophomore working for a small CRE firm. I thought I was going to be doing a lot of financial analysis, but my job has entirely been property management. For example, I spent the entire week last week formatting email ads. I'm not getting paid, and I took this job to learn about finance. It seems that the firm I work for does minimal financial modeling. All of their valuations is dependent on brokers, and they don't even keep track of their IRR

I want to propose a financial valuation project to my boss so that I can work on things I'm interested in learning. Does anyone have any advice for project I could do? I'm at a point where I don't know what I don't know, so anything helps. If you have experience in this industry, what is something I could do that teaches me about real estate valuation? Or anything with interest rates?

5 Comments
 

You should not be wasting your time at a firm that solely relies on brokers valuations and OM's. I find it hard to believe they don't have anyone doing any real modeling work or have files that value their properties. This may have worked in the past decades real estate environment but not anymore. I would focus on finding your next internship that will give you real experience. Other than that, there are online resources you can use if you still want to learn. I'd recommend looking in to Project Destined, CRE Analyst, or even the training course on WSO

 
Most Helpful

You have to think about the fact that you’re a rising sophomore and you’re in an internship. Even though it’s unpaid they are doing you a favor because they don’t truly need your help, they’re simply doing it so you can put something on your resume. They are just offloading simple tasks that don’t require a ton of checking on their part. In reality what you do at this internship will only ever matter when it comes time to look for your next internship. You’ll just have to BS on your resume to make the work you were doing so it sounds more meaningful.

If you want to do some kind of financial analysis the best thing you can do is voice that to your higher up and ask if they have something for you that could provide that experience. I wouldn’t suggest coming up with a project on your own.

I had a similar experience during a summer internship and simply asked my manager. I didn’t end up getting the kind of work I wanted so I just did modeling courses and bought a real estate textbook to work through on my own.

 

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