Development vs Acquisitions Lifestyle

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I can't speak to lifestyle but I work in acquisitions and I've been thinking about making the move to development so here's my $0.02... I definitely think development would be more rewarding, but much more of a pain in the ass. I'm more of a numbers guy personally, so I don't necessarily want to deal with all of the land acq/zoning/construction BS, so acq is great from that standpoint. I'd love to hear others' perspective, but I would imagine that comp in development is more performance-based, so it's either feast or famine, even more so than acquisitions.

From a lifestyle perspective, while it will generally depend on the firm and staffing - acquisitions will have more late nights as an analyst crunching numbers. Deal comes in and you have 1 week (or quicker) to figure out if you want to bid. Fire drill this week that means and a lot of late night. Acquisitions has more unexpected fire drills. It’s sprinting. 
 

Development is more a marathon. There is always a problem which you need to find a solution and a fire to put out, but generally, there are not as many hard and fast deadlines. If it takes an extra day. It’s more or less okay (except keep in mind you’re fighting the clock that is your construction loan-so you need to keep things generally moving). While you may have less nights, due to the marathon nature, instead of having one week working until 10PM every night on a new deal for 5 days straight, you might work until 730 at night Monday - Thursday. Leave work Friday at 530. And work Saturday for 2-6 hours. And you might do this for 1-2 months straight as you are in a busier time period. So you’ll have a bit better control of your life. 
 

One of the things I prefer about development, having done both, I really don’t have anything come blow up my night. I have a busy spring working 6 days per week for 3 months, but since that ended, I’ve been getting out at 6 pm every night and it’s been slow. I’m headed into a busy fall - but I’ve know about it for 2 months. So I can manage my own expectations. My point being and the best way to describe it - acquisitions has many little sprints while development is more akin to running a marathon where you know ahead of time it will be busy. Personally, I think the latter is easier for a lifestyle because you can plan around your upcoming busy period. 

My last comment didn’t post. But totally agree with the more draining part. In acquisitions - you can get away with a yes or no decision tree because once you’ve proven a deal doesn’t work - you don’t waste your time and you move on. In development you need to keep trucking and finding solutions. This was very draining for me at the start. 
For example - I’ve been spending 8 weeks on property operations issues because I haven’t been happy with the answers my operations team has been giving me. So I keep pushing them to find a different solution and give me creative answers because I don’t want to / can’t do what they are telling me I need to do. 

This will really come down to how you personally get to be fulfilled. If you would be happier looking at acres of trees or an empty lot and in 2-3 years have an apartment complex/office tower/mall generate $6-8M for you per year and transform a neighborhood while you solve intricacies of local municipalities' zoning/environmental/etc. restrictions to fit your product then development will be for you. But if you find fulfillment in basically playing a game of monopoly in real life and scouring the Earth for a bunch of great deals in the haystack of shit deals and look at numbers on a screen tell you that you're doing a great job at investing while not having to be bogged down in the weeds of managing the asset day and night to get those numbers to go up, then acquisitions would be better for you. 

In RE lifestyle will (generally) never be horrible when it comes to WLB, but like pudding said, development rarely has hard deadlines given the long nature of it whereas acquisitions has hard deadlines to make a decision on bidding. Hours will be comparable over the lifespan of your career either way, just depends on do you want to cram all the hours in a few days or spread it out over a lot. 

If you like to do both acquisitions for the immediacy of the investment and development for the more entrepreneurial aspect, then stay in your current role. Depending on the firm you could do both long into your years as a VP. A good amount of dev companies will also do acquisitions as well and depending on how big of a shop you work at, it could fall under the same umbrella of finance department. Don't choose one for the sake of choosing if you'd prefer to keep doing both because there are definitely shops out there where you can continue on the path you are if that's how you'd feel more fulfilled.