Odd Question - Transitioning from CRE Private Equity to M&A Investment Banking?

Hi All,

Long-time lurker here. I posted once before to ask a question when I was offered a new position earlier this year (left a tiny boutique RE Investment Bank to go work for a small-/mid-sized REPE fund with around $1B AUM), but I've been thinking about my career path quite a bit lately and I'm very unsure of whether CRE finance is the kind of work I want to be doing for the rest of my career.

On my free time, I'll often find myself reading articles and publications related to corporate finance and M&A banking. This area seems to interest me a lot more than CRE does, it seems a bit more exciting, and M&A was my preferred career path as I was finishing up undergrad. Unfortunately, due to a mediocre GPA (held down by a lackluster freshman year; my "post-Freshman year" GPA was close to a 4.0) from a pretty good non-target private school (think Top 50 with a Top 25 finance program), the only good internship experience I was able to get was with a Real Estate Investment Bank. When I graduated, I spent 16 months with this same bank, then moved on to a REPE firm as an Asset Management Analyst. I was hoping to hold out for an Acquisitions position, as I'd gotten as far as final-round interviews with some of the best shops anyone could hope to work for, but, for personal reasons, I decided I needed a new job sooner rather than later and took an asset management role with a very entrepreneurial shop. Since accepting the position, I've had the long-term goal of transitioning to an Acquisitions role after a year or two of asset managemnt work.

Long story short, after moving to the Asset Management position, I've found that I hate my current role and don't find Real Estate to be as interesting or exciting as it was when I was working on the equity banking side.

I've started to think that what I'd really like to do is to move into an M&A/corporate finance role, and I think I have a decent enough background for it (very strong modeling skills, extremely strong pitch book-writing skills (my old REIB position was very similar to a corporate finance role, the obvious difference being that we worked with real assets), etc.), but I also know that there are barriers between the two fields. For example, CRE modeling is much different from M&A modeling, and I've been told that M&A modeling is more difficult but that it would be easy for someone like myself to pick it up.

Can anyone here share advice or, if it exists on this site, experience in making a similar transition? Would certifications or degrees help? I've been thinking that a strong MBA program would probably make such a transition much easier, but that requires getting into a strong MBA program, which I'm not sure I can do given my "kind of" good UG transcript and "somewhat decent" work experience. I'm going to work my ass to do as well as I can on the GMAT, but I'm sure that even a 750+ score will only get me so far.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any thing anyone might be able to share.