Degrees in economics, finance, and real estate tend to be the most desirable in the eyes of employers, but CRE professionals also often come from general business, architecture, or engineering backgrounds. In CRE in general, internship/job experience along with technical skills tend to be far more important than the type of degree someone earned. Good question!

I'm trying to decide between doing real estate finance vs regular finance. Any advice on what i should do? I know finance may give me options in private equity, IB, or other non real estate fields but would still give me the option of doing CRE. Do you think it's a good idea to hedge my bets or should I go all in on real estate (I am pretty confident I want to work in CRE and take some of your financial modeling courses) I am a freshman in college. @@BreakIntoCRE

Agreed! Now is a great time to work on the technical skill set to be ready for opportunities in 2024. Thanks for watching!

Great to hear! Affordable housing is very much in demand. Good luck with the capital raise!

I work as a CRE analyst at a large bank. I had to network my way in. One of my classmates worked at the bank and she introduced me to the analyst manager and I also met for coffee/had phone calls with 4 other relationship managers and analysts in the group. They had 2 off cycle positions open up and was guided to exactly which day the online application would come online which was like Monday, 12:01am, and was told I need to be the first 100 applicants to even be looked at, so I applied at 12:01am. Then I had the interviews and got prepped w/ exact questions I’d be ask from my classmate. The people I spoke with recommended me. Then I still didn’t get the job and was told someone else got the job but then 2 weeks later they called me saying the other person turned down the offer and they offered me the job. So def not easy. Now they typically are doing on cycle hires for analysts. They are going through the school systems they recruit from and they start early. They are starting to have networking for sophomores now. And they want them to be a summer intern first then see how they do then offer the job for the next year summer. So feel like only if you’re in college you get in now. Because we haven’t done deals since mid-2022 and salaries increased, no one has left the job but they continued to hire, and now we are overstaffed at the analyst level. I know someone who just got let go as an analyst at a mortgage broker. Everyone is thinking they are going to fire a few analysts in 1Q24 as no deals and internally they don’t anticipate new originations in 2024, and if it happens def not until 2nd half of 2024 is when it’ll start to trickle in. I think hard money lenders or debt funds might have more activity as we at the bank aren’t taking any deals as they don’t pencil. Clients are hoarding cash though and getting ready, so late 2024/2025 I expect/hope for activity as we can’t survive this long without origination fees, especially as interest rates drop and we lose the interest income we are surviving on.

Despite challenges, banks still make up ~40% of the CRE lending market, and hiring will likely pick up for all lenders including banks. Page 3 of the CBRE Q3 US Lending Figures provides a helpful breakdown of production by lender (and changes since Q3 2022), which could be helpful to help guide your search (link here: www.cbre.com/insights/figures/q3-2023-us-lending-figures). Good question!

To add, since we’re overstaffed at the moment, they’ve just ask a few of the analysts to go to the workout group as that pipeline is building and likely they will transfer in Jan/Feb. 2024. So executives/upper management must be anticipating more loans in workout with less needed for origination/portfolio management needs as we’ve been pushing loans to payoff instead of renew/rollover.

@@Kurt-rg8jq Ty for this!! Much needed insight

@@BreakIntoCRE Ty!! Appreciate the link