Why do interns not get work?
I'm currently a hs intern for a local cre group, my schedule is 10-4 4 days a week. When I arrive in the office I normally have NOTHING to do that day. My boss will find something for me eventually but it is never enough to fill my day. I know this is contradictory to what most people want but I'm sitting at my desk doing nothing for ~4 hours, I want to do something!! I'm typing this right now at my desk. In the meantime I've built my LinkedIn, resume, application tracker, and taught myself basic LBO and M&A modelling. Seriously, there has to be something for me to do.
Go work somewhere else?
You have a typical teenager's view of the world. The company you work for does not exist to give you something to do. You're there to help them. If they don't have anything meaningful for you to work on, that's that. This isn't school, where the responsibility for handing out assignments is on teachers. When you're an adult, there will be many times (more and more as you get older) where the responsibility for figuring out what needs to be done will fall on you and not some authority figure.
Sounds like they're giving you a great education in what the real world is like.
I'm looking to change jobs/industries next summer but I'm going to stay on part-time through the school year. I'm going to find FO events for cap raising, not sure what industry you're in but do you have any recommendations?
I work in affordable housing.
I don't have any recommendations. All of that is dependent on what you enjoy doing or find interesting - if you think affordable housing fits the bill then I have ideas about what a smart internship/job path is, or potential off the radar things to do, but... that's pretty niche.
What kind of real value can you bring to a CRE group? If you can think of an answer to this question, be proactive and do it. If you can't, and you're just there to have something on your resume, then accept that and enjoy the labor-free credential you've been given. If you're there to learn, and you're not being given tasks, there's a million books, articles, and videos on your area of interest you can use to fill time. Most of the time interns are genuinely more of a burden on the than a value-add, so just accept that unless you can change it.
Most of what I've been doing is with capital raising, but our latest deal just fell through and right now we don't have a live deal. They've also had me in property management because there's such little going on right now. I'll try finding buyside operators for future deals, because we've struggled with capital raising. I've definitely been teaching myself a lot in my areas of interest in my free time and building my own skills to hopefully eventually help out seriously with deal analysis. They gave me the max bonus for this summer so I guess they're happy with what I've been doing, but I know I could be doing so much more. Anything you recommend looking into for capital raising?
Honestly, sounds like you're doing a better job than I did in terms of killing time. Don't have any recs in terms of capital raising, but one thing I did that I learned a lot from was asking to be put on calls that you're not directly invited to. If you know that a member of the team is talking to investors or a bank, ask to join camera/mic off and take notes on how they converse/what they focus on. I did this with my company's calls to our PE backers and learned a lot from it.
Seconding this. Our interns shared same concerns about not having much to do, so we tried to allocate work to them, but tasks that would take us maybe 20-30 minutes, would take them several hours to a few days and require a lot of hand holding, ended up being a bit of a "burden". I'm sure they learned a lot, but we ended up having to correct a lot of things for something that wouldn't normally require much thought.
Not to mention, the way interns are allocated at my current firm, the teams don't request them, they are just kind of assigned. Many are "relationship hires". Interns can't "trade" anyways and we don't have many tasks that we could delegate, so we didn't want interns, but were assigned a few.
Ended up having to create "teaching material" for the interns and have team members create presentations (this was the first time I opened powerpoint in several months) / projects for the interns to go over.
So yes - we do realize there isn't much for you to do after the first few weeks, but there's not really a good solution. :/
Piling onto this comment - as an intern, your job should be to identify these tasks that would take you hours but the team 20-30 minutes. Learn what they do that condenses that time line and practice it. This isn't going to practical in every use case. Many efficiencies in CRE are gained through underwriting hundreds of deals. This is more applicable to the technical side of things.
For me, as an intern with a multifamily shop, it was simply learning how to organize, reformat, and export a T12 & RR to an UW template.
When I was given a fresh RR as an intern in college, it could have initially taken me hours to figure out how to get everything onto one line and ensure everything exported matched up with the source doc. After learning the key strokes & process from watching one of the senior analysts, I was able to get it down in 10-15 minutes.
Same thing with a T12 - learn how to move that data around and identify externalities. Have the team give you source docs on live deals they're looking at. Look at the monthly totals for all income & expense buckets (Net Rental, Other Income, Repairs, Payroll, etc.) and identify externalities. Do mental exercises where you attempt to extrapolate why this externality may have happened (for example - there's a huge contract paint pop in one month, but a corresponding spike in economic vacancy).
If you can generate any of these skills during your internship, it will serve well as you look to eventually find a job.
You will almost never add value as an intern. Your job is to absorb information and not get in the way. If you can jump in and follow along / contribute to a conversation, you're ahead of the game.
The place I work at is an undersized group, so the CEO is my boss and the person who hired me lol. What you're saying makes a lot of sense but they were the one who chose me / chose to hire an intern. Definitely going to try focusing on finding ways to interject myself with useful input but not force myself in and be a burden.
s
Because you will most likely screw it up or over complicate it and it is probably easier for them to do it themselves. That is the honest answer.
Because they’re fucking useless and then a 20 minute task into a two day task
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