Which RE companies aren’t sweatshops?

Trying to target non-sweatshop companies in my search. Focused on equity roles, preferably NYC. Can you provide some names? Even if pay isn’t amazing, that’s ok. I have intel on some but would love to hear more

38 Comments
 

Echoing above. I’m at one of the large balance sheet lenders (not one of the 2 aforementioned) and we have multiple people with equity experience. Comp is great for hours worked but I’ve been on calls with seniors past 12 and on weekends.

The one thing I will say is, you may be bored / frustrated by the processes at a bank if you come from a private equity company. The work isn’t always interesting and it can be hard to get some stuff done. I would also say that a bank can be a revolving door so you may see a lot of people coming and going.

 

A lot of development shops are not sweatshops due to the nature of development. You aren’t more effective in development by working 80 hours vs. 40. All that matters is results - anticipating issues and responding to them - whether or not that takes 4 hours or 40. 

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

I think that the baseline isn't that sweaty but I think recently almost all dev shops with deliveries since 2022 have been incredibly sweaty. Everyone and their mother is running into overruns, loan workouts, lease up/sales not hitting projections, rents not ripping and making proforma, etc. It's been incredibly rough at least from what I've seen around my peers and layoffs that have been shoving more work on fewer people. Either you're overworked or unemployed it seems like

 
porkbellies

Development shops without new deliveries are sweaty right now too, if they have any office exposure. Tons of workouts, super high levels of stress over existing deals where tenants are rolling off.  

In fairness to the original question, there is a large difference between stress and sweaty.  Principals may be freaking out and losing their hair but that doesn't always translate to junior people getting slammed

 

I feel like vertically integrated RE shops or REITs can be chill. Otherwise maybe some smaller repe firms that don't have billions of dollars to deploy every single quarter.

Generally though Good Firm = Good Deal Flow = Longer Hours. I've seen people at my firm go from deal team to PM / AM work in order to have a better lifestyle too.

 

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