What CRE Executives Want In An Increasingly Fraught Job Market

Real estate development has always required niche knowledge of specific components of the business, whether financing or design or navigating government, and developers have hired graduates with those specialties in mind.

But to stand out today, new college graduates — who are facing the highest unemployment rate in a decade — need to be able to do everything, including incorporating artificial intelligence into their workloads, developers said at Bisnow and the New York University Schack Institute of Real Estate's development conference last week.

“I wouldn't be able to hire myself today into our company,” Kirk Goodrich, president of Monadnock Construction, said onstage at the NYU Kimmel Center. “That's how much has changed.”

Unemployment in the U.S. has hovered between 4% and 4.5% over the past two years, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the unemployment rate for college graduates between 22 and 27 has, for more than a year, been hovering at rates not seen since the end of the Global Financial Crisis, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data.

Getting a foot in the door in the commercial real estate industry is harder than ever, industry players said.

“We used to hire kids out of school — liberal arts students only. We wanted to hire the best athletes, the people who could think the most,” said Joel Breitkopf, principal of Alchemy Properties. “The business has evolved a lot, and the market and the industry has evolved a lot.”

Thirty years ago, when Goodrich first entered the field, new hires only had to be specialized in one area. For affordable housing, that was the ability to financially engineer deals, whether dealing with federal low-income housing tax credits or the buying and selling of Section 8 properties.

That is different today, he said. Because affordable housing now has to look good, has to be resilient and sustainable, and has a strong chance of being built on wetlands or land requiring remediation, Monadnock now looks for design professionals who can also finance deals.

“There are tons of people like me who spent their lives underwriting affordable deals and understanding legal structures,” he said. “I could hire those people anywhere.”

Jumping directly into a development job might not be the right move, developers said. Instead, coming to the industry after spending a few years in government and understanding how the public and private sectors interact would give new hires uncommon expertise.

Slate Property Group has hired people who have spent time working for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, as well as from the state Department of Homes and Community Renewal, Slate principal David Schwartz said. 

“We're looking for more people that have that experience of working in affordable housing,” he said. “It is a more complicated and nuanced business than market-rate.”

“I couldn't agree with that more,” MSquared principal Carolee Fink said, adding that her more than two decades in government were “the best training one could ever have.”

MSquared was founded by Alicia Glen, former deputy mayor under Bill de Blasio.

Outside of affordable housing, graduates with a range of skills and expertise stand out, developers said.

For students entering the job market in the next couple of years, being able to demonstrate a range of interests and transferable skills might be the key to landing a job after graduating.

Ironstate Properties President and CEO Michael Barry and his brother wrestled from childhood through college, which taught him the value of teamwork and to present himself with confidence, he said.

Breitkopf, meanwhile, once interviewed a Yale graduate who included his role as the university’s president of the Grateful Dead club on his résumé.

“When I lecture at colleges, I always talk about people taking philosophy classes because of the ability to think and understand complex concepts,” Breitkopf said. “For someone to be able to pull something from their past or from a passion into the processes, into their thinking, is super important.”

And for students graduating now, having mastery of new evolutions in tech — especially AI — is crucial, Affinius Capital Senior Managing Director and Head of Lending Michael Lavipour said.

“You're going to be more likely to be smarter and better at using AI than the people that you work for, and so definitely make sure that you embrace it,” he told the audience, which included many NYU students. 

He added that spending time in the office also ensures new hires develop skills that AI can’t replace.

Martin Nussbaum, Schwartz's partner at Slate Property Group, has already seen examples of new graduates coming in and doing exactly that. A new analyst with the company “runs circles around what I ever thought we'd be able to do” by overlaying Claude with Excel and programming.

“I think it's a very challenging job market today, so I'm sympathetic to that,” he said. “But I think to differentiate yourself, you need to understand how to overlay that technology into a new company's software system.”