All,
I've been lurking WSO for many years now and now am looking for advice in breaking into REIB. I've been working in portfolio management at a top life insurance company. Portfolio I cover, entails a variety of fixed income product to REPEs, PE, and Hedge Funds. The work mainly do is asset allocation, cash management and duration management.
I've been here for 2.5 years and felt my next move would be into Real Estate. (I'm currently invested in 2 investment properties). I've already purchased some books and will be signing up for a BIWS RE course to perfect my modeling around RE.
• With my current experience, how hard would it be to transition into REIB, with no modelling experience?
• When does recruiting start for REIB? Is it different for folks with 2+ years of experience?
• Are there certain interview questions to look out for?
I'm going to assume when you say REIB that you mean commercial real estate brokerage. There are some actual REIB firms (HFF just bought one) that do real estate M&A and work with publicly-traded REITs, for example, but by and large REIB = brokerage.
Do you want to do REIB long-term or as a first step in commercial real estate to eventually work for a REPE firm, equity shop, REIT, etc?
REIB comes in different flavors: tenant rep, leasing, investment sales, debt placement, etc. Again, what do you want to do short-term and long-term?
Hi - Thanks for the response. I meant REIB from the capital seeker to capital provider perspective to fund acquisitions/ capital-restructuring/etc. (Basically, traditional IB)
I'm looking to break into RE through this so that I can eventually work in a REPE. Over the long term, I'd like to become an investor. I'm thinking REIB to REPE would be a pretty solid route.
Ok, if you want to make the transition into CRE, you should start thinking and speaking like a CRE guy, not a corporate finance/portfolio management guy. Case in point: what you are describing we would describe as debt brokerage, which I agree would be an excellent first job in CRE given your goals. Others can chime in, but I think you stand a much smaller chance of breaking in via a CRE equity shop than you do debt brokerage.
Look up debt placement with CBRE, HFF, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, JLL, [insert major CRE brokerage here] and you're off to a good start.
It's gonna be really really hard to make that move without modelling skills. A bank hiring an experienced analyst is gonna want them to be able to hit the ground running - I'm not even sure if lateral analysts receive any training.
Why banking? Why haven't you tried to move directly to the investment side?
I'm not worried about the modelling skills - I can learn that own my own. In order for me to move into the RE investment side, I believe I need to build subject matter expertise. I don't think there's no better way than doing that, than moving into REIB.
Made a similar transition recently. Expect to be tested on your modeling ability. I took the REFM course and found it sufficient to cover the difficulty of the testing.
I was actually leaning towards purchasing that course. I'm currently reading the 'The Real Estate Game' by William J. Poorvu to familiarize myself with the RE ins and outs before I start the course.
Quick question - when you were prepping to move into your recent transition, what sources did you use to keep up with the CRE markets. Did you read up on recent transactions/live deals?
WSJ Wednesday Property Report, Local Biz Journals, ACRE.com, asotreg.com. No one's going to expect you to be an expert, just be able to speak intelligently about valuation, market in general. You can niche down if they cover a certain region or property type.
There's a good way to find what skills employers are looking for by searching for the Oxford Said finance lab syllabus. Even though that program is for Said business and Oxford MSc students, if you study what they do you'll cover the fundamentals. I used the BIWS tutorial and interviewed on Wall Street, for commercial real estate investment sales and PE, et al coming from a non-financial background and none of my interviewers cared that I used it; they wanted the ^^ type of stuff and what the other posters said.
Seems like the Oxford Said finance syllabus is pretty much like the BIWS/REFM courses - thanks for the info!
I assume you can only access Finance lab material if you're Oxford student?
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