Feeling Lost on my First CRE Financial Analyst Invterview

As the tile says I am feeling a bit lost for my CRE financial analyst interview coming up this week as a big nationwide CRE Firm (ranked up there with C&W, CBRE etc). This will be my first rodeo with CRE and I have prior experience working internships in CB, IB, PE, WM shops

I am really confused about how I should be studying for technicals. Granted this first interview is only 15 mins long with an HR rep and I doubt we will get that far, leaving me a full week or so due to the New Year to get spend all my waking hours learning if I actually pass this screen.

At the moment should I just be practicing my behaviorals for this first 15 mins? For ex. Why the company? Why CRE etc? I know the firm at later stages is known to give take home excel exams. Being that I have only studied the BIWS IB guide for a couple Top BB superdays I had, but failed to convert.

Being at the nontarget of nontargets I feel my chance are running out (just graduated last week)

Should I continue studying that BIWS guide or is there anything else CRE geared (guides/yt videos etc) you guys found helpful. Terms that I should should know like the back of my hand like cap rate, pro-forma cap rate, cap rate compression... Anything else term wise different that IB to help me at least fake that I am walking the walk?

In regards to the take home exam mentioned above Am I wrong to assume that the excel exam will be just a DCF on property valuation? If anyone could shine some light on this that would help me so much.


crossposting in IB forum to get some more eyes.

 
Most Helpful

Do you know what team or division this role is for? Or is it generalist/rotational? 

Given the short nature of this interview, clearly just screening by HR to see if you should be sent for review by the hiring team, I think you should have a good "survey" of what they do and the general industry. You may get the "are you interested" or "do you know about the X industry/property type/etc" questions, so being able to legit know what they are talking about can be huge. 

I would think the job description would be the road map to follow. If it talks a lot about excel modeling, do some, review a CRE model. You can more legit claim "familiarity" if you have looked at models, even if you are not fully at mastery level (never lie, but excel skills can be learned quickly, not the hill to die on). Since you are new to CRE, read up on places like GlobeSt.com and Bisnow, get to know this firm and what they do, just take it one step at a time. 

 

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