Currently a 2nd yr associate at a large developer (think Hines, Related, Greystar, TC) in the US and am considering trying to jump across the pond to London to work on the investment side.
Have lots of experience in site acquisitions, equity and debt raising. Current team runs very lean.
Anyone have experience making this sort of transition?
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Sponsorship may be an issue, not every fund in London is open to sponsor.
If your company has an office in London you could try to move there and lateral to a REPE
Should have mentioned, i have a UK passport.
Not an issue these days
Idk man. I'm based in continental Europe and have seen many funds not offering sponsorship
Other than moving from US to UK, are you asking if anyone has made the switch from a sponsor/GP to more of an investment role/LP seat? If so, yes, not uncommon. Plenty of investment firms/funds hire from developers and independent fund-less sponsors. You’ll be further from the real estate day to day operations but still very involved on major strategy decisions. Instead of focusing on one product type in one or a few select markets, depending on the firm, you’ll look at a wide variety of asset classes, capital structures, geographies, business plans and risk profiles. The LP/investment seat is typically much more finance and less real estate, but I made a similar switch (prior role at an operator) and the real estate specific knowledge has been extremely valuable in my current REPE seat - such us understanding lease mechanics, construction projects, etc., that someone in REPE who came from an IB background for example would be totally clueless on.
Great insight. What makes it lean finance heavy, assuming you're taking a comparable seat on the LP side? For example, as an asset manager for a LP, you're doing more property and portfolio financial analyses rather than managing property managers and talking to brokers?
Are you happy you made the switch? If so, for what reasons? I.e. higher comp, less getting into the weeds, etc.
Yes very happy I made the switch, especially in today’s market where most of my friends on the sponsor/developer side have seen all their promotes go to zero. We’re also not under presssure to do deals just to keep the lights on so we can be very selective which deals we deploy capital into. Was paid full bonus and got a material raise this year I’m not sure that’s the case most places.
We also don’t bid on any deals or chase them ourselves, but rather review deals that a sponsor has tied up and is raising JV equity for and we probably see 30-50+ any given week. We’re always in a controlling equity position (min 51% of equity stack), so we ultimately drive the boat while the sponsor is in the trenches executing the business plan. I honestly prefer the higher-level finance / strategy side as opposed to getting in trenches/executing the day to day, and we still are certainly involved in asset management decision making and do our own analysis and work on any major decisions.
Also it helped that overall comp popped like 40% when I moved over as well.
Is working at a Hines or Related not considered the “investment side”? I assume you’re referring to moving to an LP..
I did it..I was at a GP and made the shift to a firm who does both GP and LP positions but most of my oversight is on LP investments. I like the LP side way more. We get in the weeds don’t get me wrong, and a lot of day to day ops, but I’m way more of a high level RE finance guy at the end of the day, which my experience on the LP side has been.
By "high level RE finance guy" do you mean you like to look at the numbers (quantitative) related to an asset/deal rather than the operational performance/strategy?
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