Why Industrial?

Also interested

in rust we trust

I've been working in ground-up industrial development for 3+ years now starting right out of college. To answer your first question. I really just stumbled into industrial. I knew I wanted to get into development right out of school if possible and was fortunate to end up with a few offers in different asset classes. Ultimately, I ended up deciding based on the individual firm (wanted to be at smaller shop with more hands-on experience, easier to rise up the ladder, etc.) and that offer happened to be for industrial. 

With that being said, there's a lot of things I've learned to like about Industrial (echoing some of the points above): 

• The People: Development is a people business, and the people you work with day to day really impact the enjoyment of the job. Industrial ain't flashy and the people ain't flashy either. By and large they are good, down to earth people that you'd want to grab a beer with, and the douchebags don't last (in my limited experience).  Not to say this isn't true in other asset classes but in my experience, I've gravitated more towards the folks in industrial. 
• Shorter Deal Lifecycle: Someone early on told me that industrial is a high-speed low-drag business, and that's true. There's a lot more time doing the fun stuff, and a lot less time deal with BS IMO. The deal flow and lifecycle has been great starting off point for my career as if gotten a lot of reps through all the development phases. Being able to see how all the cogs fit together has really upped my understanding.  It's been particularly helpful to see all development phases through singular deals, as I've seen mistakes we made earlier on in the process (primarily due diligence & design) that have come back to bite us later on (during construction and leasing mostly). That would be rare to see in other asset classes this early on. 
• Simple but nuanced: Let's not sugar coat it, industrial is pretty simple. The site work & TIs can definitely get complex as the user above mentioned, but shell buildings are not rocket science. But if you want complicated, go be a rocket scientist then.  This has been great to learn how to read design documents and so on starting out, but there is a lot of nuance here. Seemingly small changes can have large impacts on functionality & leasing as well as the economics of the deal. There's a lot of tradeoffs and weighing those tradeoffs is an interesting problem to solve.     
• Interesting Tenants: Industrial is different from other asset classes in that what we build is a capital asset for our users and the design decisions we make impact the functionality and efficiency of their businesses. Learning what those important factors are is critical to being a good developer. Also learning about all the different business of our tenants and how they manage their complex supply chains is personally fascinating to me. 
• Staying power: There's a lot structural changes in industrial right now and big tail winds. That'll drive incremental growth and as long as we stay consuming goods, there will always be a demand for industrial product. I don't think our business model is going away anytime soon. 

Overall, industrial has been a great and interesting place to start my career, but don't get into it. There are too many good developers chasing too few deals right now and I want to stay busy.