Curious about the hours people work in Real Estate Private Equity. Seems like a great industry as far as a good work/life balance that still has solid compensation. People seem chill too. What does a typical day/week look like for you guys, and what does your compensation look like?
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When I was in traditional private equity (fund) I was starting at 8:30 AM and working until 10-11 PM most nights Monday - Thursday. Friday I was done by 7:30 and than I worked a full day generally either Saturday or Sunday. I had plenty of weekends where I also worked a half to full day the second weekend day as well.
So that put me in the range of 70-80 hour weeks. It was absolutely brutal. Personally, I was not built for that and have always been aware of myself that I need time to myself to decompress. I didn’t know I was getting into hours that bad when I joined.
Prior to the PE firm, I was at a Life Co, where I worked 45-60 hour weeks. Usually it was around 50. I never worked both weekend days and if I did work weekends, it was 75% of the time driven by the fact that I chose to go home each night at 730-8 the week prior and had planned to use 5 or so hours on Saturday or Sunday to get my work done.
Due to the stupid hours I had in PE, I jumped to a developer. While I’m still new at this developer, my hours will probably be 45-60 with some weekend work maybe. I’ve also made the transition from acquisitions to development which I’m really excited about.
Damn, was the PE fund a corporate PE fund or a real estate PE fund? What kind of workstreams did you have that required you to be putting in those hours? Was it just modelling and putting together slide decks?
It was a real estate PE fund. The work streams were underwriting new deals, asset managing current deals, and portfolio management work. The firm had zero process or templates. The hours were driven by management who felt A) if we weren’t working long hours we weren’t doing our jobs and B) management setting unrealistic deadlines to ‘keep the business moving.’ Effectively doing a full underwriting in 24 hours. And the problem was, although possible, when 4 deals become ‘urgent’ (from the same acquisition officer) and everything needs to be a full underwriting, you can’t do all of them. Plus, it was a heavy meeting culture, so being in meetings for 5-7 hours of 9-5 didn’t help - you started your work day at 5 PM. So it became this brutal cycle of always trying to catch up on the new ‘fire drill’ and having someone breathing down your throat not caring if you were in meetings all day. And than another acquisition officer thinking their work should take precedent over someone else’s deliverable. So…it was great fun to manage! :)
Middle market fund - 50 hours a week (pretty much nonstop days of grinding, half hour for grabbing a quick lunch/going for a walk), but every other week or so I would have to travel 2-3 days which were long days of flights, tours, meetings, then dinners and drinks (sounds fun, but gets exhausting).
RARELY worked weekends, maybe a few emails or finishing up/preparing for a presentation, but nothing that would ruin my weekends.
Not in PE, but one of the brokers at the firm where I’m interning took me with him to meetings with a bunch of clients and property tours, it was a lot of fun running around the city for the day but can totally see how it can get exhausting after a few years of doing it.
I was around the 55-70 mark. But hours can heavily fluctuate depending on your role, live deals, and also how lean your fund is.
Curious what type of fund and role were you there?
Similar to others I work 50-60 hours per week, very minimal weekend work. And I generally set my own working hours (I come in around 9, leave around 5:30, and hop back on if I need to around 8).
From a comp perspective ~$250k all-in and another $150k-$250k in carry.
Question for You
That’s like 42 hours if you’re working through lunch haha. Soo are you just logging on for 2-4 hours every single night? I feel like I would rather just stay at the office at that point.
Also, how many years experience do you have? And what exactly is the nature of the carry - realized at end of fund life?
I have kids so I go home for dinner and yeah then I hop back on for a few hours. Also this is an average, when there's a live deal/deadlines then hours can get higher, typical non-stressed week is somewhere in the 40s.
8 years of experience. Carry vests 25% per year starting from when we close each deal.
how many years of RE experience do you have?
Around 8 years.
What was your role?
What type of assets do you cover? And how big is the fund?
also is this shop ex bankers or mostly re guys
We're almost exclusively multifamily. Fund is ~$2b AUM.
CEO is an ex-lawyer, but more of a politician than anything (he'll be holding a position in the current administration). Of the other partners 2 are lawyers, one is home grown, and the other 3 are RE guys.
Do you guys do mostly value add and opportunistic deals? This comp is insane. What was your prior work experience.
I am 99% sure I know which firm you are talking about, if it is based in Century City.
2nd year analyst at a MF: 70-80 hours and ~$150k all in comp
Comments attached.
Considering base is 110k - you make less than 50% as a bonus?
150 sounds low for mf?
Associate at a small PE firm, typically around 50-55 hours, usually doing ~9-10 hour days during the week with 0-10 hours during the weekend. My first live deal was so messy though I worked like 100 hours the last 2 weeks, and we have two deals coinciding next month so my hours are on the uptick.
Damn this thread is pretty depressing haha. I think people really underestimate just how bad a 60 hour week is. That means you have just 2 hours or so each night to decompress and exercise (god forbid you didn’t eat dinner at work). I don’t know how long I could sustain that lifestyle. At that point what are you as a person besides a vessel for work
Welcome to WSO, where 60 hours is an easy work week - real estate hours are generally considered manageable compared to PE/HF or especially banking (where analysts notoriously work 80-100 hours on average).
Remember, the 50-60 hours people here are citing are averages, so a lot of the time you're working 40 hours one week then 70 another week. When you're only slammed one week a month and otherwise working 45-50 hours its not that bad (and for any high paying career, very normal - nobody's going to pay you multiple hundreds of thousands a year to work 40 hours a week).
Tech. There’s a reason they’re winning the most talent these days
Not to mention a big chunk of those 20-30 extra hours above the standard 40 often consists of meetings, conversations, general "face time", etc. A lot of the time you aren't actually "working", or using your brain and doing actual analysis. Still exhausting though, don't get me wrong, but often isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds. At the end of the day, it's role/company/cycle dependent.
It's not so much the hours, but the facetime. At my firm, folks leave at 5-6p, but will log on and email at night at home with their kids/families. Tons of RE companies out there with good WLB and culture. Anything above 50 hour of facetime a week in the office average falls into the category of a "sweat shop" - in my opinion.
I think it depends. I've had many 60 hour weeks when we are busier, but I'm also fully remote, so I might work 8am-7pm M-F and then 4-5 hrs scattered on the weekend, this is versus my 40-50 hour week in corp dev where I had to wake up at 7:15am to leave 8:15am to get to work in the office, leave at 5:30pm and get home at 6;30pm. So my days are really no different even though I am working 1-2 extra hours a day, most of that time would've been sitting in traffic.
Long work hours are magnified if you are in an office and have to commute though. And like CREnadian said, I've had plenty of weeks post-mortem of a deal that I work from 10am-6pm and don't do anything on the weekend. Every job in finance that pays $200K+ will have some 60 hour weeks, many 50 hour weeks, and some 40 hour weeks.
Keep in mind that during those 60 or so hours a week, you aren't using your brain all 60 hours
Most days I work about 10-12 hours, but sometimes I'm just monitoring my inbox/chats to make sure no fire drills came up. I've spent whole days doing just that. So take the hours with a grain of salt and it certainly varies by firm/team
Yeah but it's the same thing at a job where you're working 40 hours a week or whatever. It's pretty apples-to-apples.
At a $2B family fund. All GP capital. My boss works 25-30 hours a week. Due to the learning curve, I'm working 50 hours a week.
Nice, fancy doing a small write up on the role? how you got it, comp, risk type, responsibilities etc? I'm at an institutional developer right now and would be really interested in hearing about this kind of shop!
$1B debt fund. Team is lean so 70-80 /week. $250k all in.
What's your experience level?
2 years at a REIT, 2 years as an analyst at another debt fund. I’m a “analyst” at my current fund but they don’t have associates, just analysts, principals and MDs.
For everyone that worked in a corporate REPE firm, what were some of the financial levers/analysis that made upper management pull the trigger on properties? What were some key financial takeaways that are important when analyzing each deal besides the typical IRR etc.?
The key metric most shops are going to look at is your stabilized Yield on Cost and Cash on Cash, or in other words, what return am I going to get on my money after I've done all of the improvements I'm going to do to the asset.
Not too many REPE shops really solve for a COC return. The pension funds and endowments that are coming up with 95%+ of this money tend to care more about total return.
YOC / ROC is definitely an important metric for development / deals with heavy lifts. May not mean quite as much / be markedly different from cap rate on many deals.
IRR (and how much of it you're juicing with a bullshit exit cap) and Price per Pound (both entry and exit relative to market) are some of the main items for overall supply and demand products (multifamily, select service hospitality, self storage, parking assets, etc). Retail and Office can become a whole different animal depending on the asset and I've really only done those deals from a debt perspective so don't have much to constructively add.
Price per square foot is still huge in office. All the asset classes are pretty similar, you want to be within range of market on entry and exit.
Work 70-90 hours/week as a senior analyst at a MF. Cleared $200k last year and expect $230k this year minimally. Hours are brutal and work 90% of weekends. Cheers to golden handcuffs and my Malibu mansion in 30 years. Am I being sarcastic? I can’t even answer that…
How many years of experience? I’m going into a MF this year and have been trying to figure out comp (base and bonus) progression through analyst years. Happy to do a pm as well
Received $200k comp at the 3.5 year mark.
Deleted.
Senior Analyst at a GP with megafund REPE LP's (so lots of deal volume and roll up your sleeve kinda capital). Tough to benchmark as I had a very non traditional path through and through, but comp all in is $175-$200 range. 9:30/10-10/11 M-Th. 10-6/7 Friday. Limited weekend work. So something +/- 60 hour weeks. The IB board tells me this is a light workload, but frankly, it isn't easy not being able to make any plans to do anything on the weekdays. Packing your entire social life into the weekends can be difficult. Worth it for me right now, but I don't see myself being able to keep this up past a 2-4 year kinda run.
A1 at MF REPE was doing 70 hours/week on average, 60 being light weeks and 80-100 sprints for 4-6 weeks at a time every quarter. 160 all in, and averaged ~4 hours of sleep/night due to insomnia along with long hours.
Now at a LMM/MM REPE working 40-50 and making 100 all in. Much prefer the better hours, and quite frankly better/chiller team since nobody is stressed out from not sleeping for months on end.
Awesome, congrats mate. Out of curiosity what's it like at lmm/mm? what is your typical deal size? is there higher return potential because its smaller deals and less institutional?
It's going great actually. We just received institutional backing from a BB for a couple hundred million in equity, so have experienced insane growth the last few months. Comp bumped up to 125K base and (I'm assuming) 50%+ bonus. Carry/co-invest is TBD. Team grew by almost 3x now and still hiring. Hours are stretching into the 60s and 70s range, though--only downside.
Considering base is 110k - you make less than 50% as a bonus?
Base was 85 two years ago
1B: REPE in southeast
Working 40-50 hrs per week usually. In crunch time it’s around 65-75hrs.
If I’m an analyst in a non-real estate banking coverage group - is there any chance of getting into REPE for an associate role? Or do REPE funds really prefer those coming from REGL etc. backgrounds?
Someone will value your IB experience enough to want to take a punt on you, but it might be tough to start with an associate title. There are shops that greatly prefer IB analysts to Acq analysts when they're looking to hire someone with 2 years experience. Off the top of my head, Sculptor, Ares, and AG love hiring bankers. Use LinkedIn and figure out which shops have multiple analysts with that kind of background and you should target those kinds of firms.
Do you know what the hours/all in comp are like at Ares for the RE teams?
I work at a semi- institutional shop, and my hours vary from 5:30 to pretty late. In general, I feel like real estate is more social than other sectors, so we have a ton of meetings on the asset management and acquisitions side, which can be pretty annoying if you have a lot of stuff to do. Comp isn’t as good as IB and traditional PE out of school, but still making a little more than 6 figures about 1.5 years out of school. However, the upside in potential down the road, especially at smaller shops, is very high when you get carried interest and can put skin in the game.
Sr Assoc at a $6B REPE. $240k all in. Hours have been 70-80. Soul crushing. Like someone else said, I dream about work. My weekends are never really free. If I don’t work those hours, I’d get nothing done. Never cried so much at a job.
How lean does your team run? Are you working on 5+ deals at once?
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