Need advice for career
So here's the deal. I am in NYC. I have left my real estate attorney career close to seven years ago. I graduated from a well ranked law school but was not able to stay in the field due to an unfortunate combination of factors. I graduated at the top of my class from a mediocre college. Afterwards, I have worked in electronic discovery for litigation until recently to earn some money. For any one who doesn't know, this is one of the most deathly boring, least full-filling jobs there is. For several years, I have networked trying to get into the business side of real estate (I figured it would most likely be property management/lease administration). Finally, I received a job working in property management at a junior level as something between assistant prop manager and compliance/violations specialist at Cushman & Wakefield. I did well in that position, but unfortunately was laid off after only 8 months due to budget cuts. Now, I am looking again and I am really depressed. Most positions on the same level pay even worse than what I was getting and I don't even qualify for assistant prop. manager due to lack of experience. Also, a major draw back is that don't have any financial/accounting experience. I am not sure what to do. Should I go back to school to have a RE degree? I am in my late 30's. How do I get over that lack of experience? I wouldn't mind doing cash flow analysis and such and I took a class in it but no one would take me with no experience. Please help. TIA.
Go to a brokerage house, any brokerage house and try to get yourself on a team. Stay there for 1-2 years. In this 1-2 years learn as much as you can about real estate. There are two paths here, you can do well in brokerage and decide to stay cold calling and developing relationships, or during the past year or two you can read everything on how to model cash flow statements and debt and equity waterfall structures in excel. You can go from an analyst to associate at a brokerage to being an analyst or associate at a debt fund, repe, banks, etc.
The most important aspects to understand are during this 1-2 year time frame you may and probably not be making a lot or any money. Only make this transition if you can get on a team and work as a jr broker so you can say after 1-2 year that you worked on "x" amout of transaction, even if they are simple $1-$5 million deals. Many brokerage houses would love to have a lawyer work for them.
Your decision will all come down to how much money you want to spend to pursue your goals in the next couple of years. Another good way to break in if you have the money is to go to NYU MSRE and intern in the summer, I have known people who have gotten pretty good interships from this.
To whomever threw poop, this is literally how I got my start in the business and broke out of middle market brokerage and "sales" into a position that analyses equity and debt placements in NYC metro for a major player.
I am not a young kid in the industry, I broke in at 29 and know what it takes to move laterally in the field to more analytical positions, swimming against the stream of 21-25 year old analysts. When I started I knew nothing about the industry, now very big owners and investors listen or look at my research or modeling for their investment decisions.
No idea who would throw shit at you for that so I balanced it out. It's great advice.
I think you're a really solid candidate for a MSRE/MRED program, and since you're in NYC, you have a number available to you. It could prove to be the missing piece.
If you go the brokerage route, specifically the leasing route, get yourself on an agency team (representing landlords). You will learn the ins / outs of transactions and not worry about having to prospect and cold call. If you go the investment sales route and want to broker, you will be cold calling but you will pick up the basic finance concept and can transition to a more stable job in a year or two if you want.
You 100% prospect and cold call as a landlord rep broker. Why would the agency broker just sit back and hope that maybe a repped client picks their building when I could go out, find a business that isn't repped, and not have to pay a commission for their relocation? That's lazy as hell and would only work if you're in the best building in the city.
I meant it as cold call for tenant business to find clients. It is a very different call you are making if you are cold calling a tenant to represent them vs calling a broker to market your space. The same way one markets sublease space, by calling competitive buildings, a LL rep will do this. However, it is much easier knowing that you are working on a deal than just trying to set up meetings. Yes you prospect and cold call, but there will be less emphasis on it and there is more of a pipeline built out as there are other methods of marketing besides cold calling (Flyer blasts, broker breakfast / lunch, etc.). You will be on an established team hopefully, with an established pipeline. You will focus on marketing the space by making calls, showing the space, assisting with negotiating deals etc. You will have a pipeline of transactions that you will be put on and your work will consist of executing and learning. Just cold calling for tenant rep won't teach you enough in a short period of time as it can take 3-5 years to get your pipeline consistent (assuming you can make it that far).
O rly?
The office LL leasing team at my old office was the top producing team in the region (CB/JLL/Cush in secondary market). They RARELY cold called. They did call on tenants already on the rent rolls of the buildings they rep, hardly cold calls. They competed for new ownership relationships via RFP. So, no cold calling there either. Perhaps they are the exception to the rule?
I agree with pudding that you gain a better understanding of what makes a commercial property tick on the LL side as opposed to the ten rep side.
This is totally anecdotal, but I have seen transactional attorneys make the switch by doing a two hop jump by working cre brokerage for ~1.5 years and then some cre mortgage work for ~ 1.5 years and finally land on the business side of acquisitions. I think your transactional attorney background can be a powerful chit to kick into the game if played right. The key is to show it in the most technical light possible on your resume and to employers. I would avoid taking on the debt or expense of a Master's degree if you can achieve the same ends through experience. In the end, it is experience that will carry you to your next gig not a degree.
In short, do NOT be despondent. Attorneys in NYC charge +$500 (with many charging a lot more) an hour and to have one on a deal team for ad hoc off-the-cuff analyses in an industry that is 50% law is extremely valuable. If you went to a well ranked law school and passed the NY bar that means you are in league (statistically) intelligence-wise with any top 3 MBA (whether the RE industry universally understands this may be a different matter in terms of that prong of your marketability), and it shows you can work very hard and are a critical thinker (I cannot count the times someone in a good to elite b school talked about it being fun or partying regularly during it. No one, who is normal, says that about their time in a good law school and prepping for a bar exam).
One hurdle though that you must be ready to leap over is the prejudice that attorneys are inherently not finance/numbers people. To be successful on the other side of the table, you are going to have to bed all doubts that you are not as numbers savvy as the vanilla business candidate vying for the same job.
Comb these threads, put into action the more credited advice and you will be totally fine. Cheers!
I'll give you this though. Great advice. If it doesn't come naturally, get out while you still can.
Just curious, were you calling on prospective tenants or those with leases already in your portfolio?
The team in my office worked on Class B+ downtown office space as well. Similar amount of SF too.
Prospective tenants. Now granted the head of my team had the connections and never had to make a call, but he mostly focused on the bigger tenants. It was my job to fill in the gaps with law firms, architects, CPAs, and similar office users that only take 5,000-10,000 feet.
OP, and not that the advice above isn't worthwhile because it is, have you considered leaving NYC? Self study the shit out of everything real estate related and learn RE finance (honestly both are not that difficult and outside of current market conditions you should be able to learn it since you have RE law experience) but when you have some NYC experience you can leverage that to your advantage. You may be more easily able to take big city experience to a smaller area, and while Boston/Philly/DC/Chi/SF/LA/etc may be difficult because there's tons of talents there, a secondary or tertiary city may allow you to sell your wares, and live at a really cheap COL. I'm closer to your age (I'm ~40) so if you want to get out of the rat race of NYC and possibly leverage your past experience, go to a smaller town. And I don't necessarily mean moving to Utica, but there are good local developers and investment firms everywhere, as in going to a warm place like Florida, that you could probably network your way into with some personal knowledge and ammo.
Just an alternate point of view.
Thanks for all your advice and encouragement. I just wanted to clarify that I have a family so I am looking for reasonable hours and stability and decent salary, Also, preferably less stress than more. I am not looking for piles of gold. I have been networking, that's how I landed that quasi assistant property management position. I have been writing and e-mailing to the top people at property management firms to get back into it. Cash flow analysis sounds cool and I wouldn't mind doing it but I don't want to work the long hours that the analysts seem to work, or is that the wrong assumption? Thanks.
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