The CRE hiring landscape has been harsh since the pandemic, and there is little relief in sight.
Just ask Ken Robertson.
The 55-year-old Laguna Beach, California, resident who has worked as an executive with office and industrial investment companies has been job-hunting since falling victim to one of the industry’s earliest Covid-era rounds of job cuts in October 2020.
“I told my wife that I feel like I’m never going to get hired again,” he said. “It has gotten worse, and everybody is feeling it. It’s not a fun time to be in commercial real estate.”
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Cautious firms are taking their time in the hiring process in search of the exact right candidate, and salary growth has stagnated as firms hunker down in a higher-for-longer interest rate environment, with widespread caution retaining its hold on most dealmakers.
Average base salaries for 2026-2027 are set to increase by 3.6%, according to RCLCO’s annual compensation and benefits survey, released last month. That's the slowest rate of growth since at least 2023, according to RCLCO's data. In 2023-2024, the projected salary increase was 4.8%.
Bonuses once again have remained flat or increased modestly, repeating last year’s awards. Nearly half of the firms RCLCO surveyed reported no changes in bonus payouts, with 43.6% increasing award amounts. The vast majority will see bonuses of 10% or less.
“My sense is comp is going to be pulled back in a way that we haven't seen in a couple years,” Keller Augusta Senior Managing Director Kaitlin Kincaid said. “For the last two years, firms have been like, ‘We didn't make any money. How are we going to continue to pay people?’ But they found a way to keep people who are contributing happy. I think that we're at a point that it's actually no longer sustainable to do that.”
Robertson has been applying for jobs while doing some advisory and freelance work on the side. While he has continued to network and seek work, he has found that the market has gotten even more difficult in the last year. He has widened his search and found that companies are getting much more specific with roles and taking fewer chances, only hiring people with the exact skill set and experience they want.
Firms expect more and more from every hire, and the ideal candidate needs to “check every box,” Kincaid said. She has found the hiring process has been dragged out as well. Finding the perfect person can take so long that occasionally candidates have found another role by the time an offer finally gets made, she said.
Merger and acquisition activity is part of the reason for executive and management jobs being removed from the market, according to Tyler Kastelberg, founder at Bullpen, a CRE recruiter. Companies are active and busy, but not necessarily increasing profits or their ability to hire.
In search of those all-important profits, firms are prioritizing top performers and revenue-generating roles as fundraising challenges, muted deal activity and economic uncertainty force companies to do more with less.
“I think the messaging is going to be like, unfortunately, we're all in this together, and we need to cut across the board,” Kincaid said.
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Nailing down who is or isn’t in demand in this environment can be difficult because that varies substantially by firm, according to Lucy Bertsch, a managing director at RCLCO.
Roles focused on creating value within an existing portfolio, such as asset management, property management, portfolio management, accounting and finance, are more in demand, Kincaid said. She argued that fundraising positions simply cost too much during a moment of muted transaction activity.
Others see it differently. Capital-raising gigs have been in high demand, according Kent Elliott, principal at RETS Associates.
“The capital-raising environment continues to be challenging for many firms,” Bertsch said. “Capital raisers who have successfully closed on a fund may see more competitive incentives this year-end.”
Broadly speaking, inflation figures are outweighing cost-of-living increases, Elliott said. But he cautioned that isn’t a blanket statement. While his firm has done fewer placements in 2026 than it did in 2025, there are still plenty of exceptions, he said.
With more modest and limited hiring and compensation budgets, firms may be actively searching for candidates, but finding the right one in a reasonable time remains a challenge.
“It comes down to who's got the money to grow, and that's definitely not everybody,” Elliott said. “There are groups out there that are struggling with fundraising without a doubt, because their track record is totally out of vogue for what's in vogue in the marketplace right now.”
Despite the continued acceleration of AI adoption in CRE, the impact of artificial intelligence on hiring has been unclear.
“From data RCLCO has collected, we’ve seen some hints that AI could be one of many factors contributing to workforce sizing,” Bertsch said. “Total turnover for non-on-site positions is up 5 percentage points year-over-year. Is this all due to AI? Surely not. But it may point to efficiencies companies are experiencing, resulting in needing fewer people to execute the same level of work.”
Kincaid said she doesn’t believe AI is going to replace a team of analysts anytime soon, but she has observed that every organization is thinking about the technology, using it to create efficiencies and actively hiring around that skill set across all hires.
RETS Associates has done research into AI usage, especially at the associate level, and found that 73% of analysts and associates now say AI has a meaningful or transformative effect on their work, up from 41% in 2025.
That is a sign that the technology isn’t replacing jobs, according to Elliott. He hasn’t seen AI-specific hires or roles, for instance, but it is becoming more ingrained in the workforce and workflow.
That said, his survey has shown that analyst and associate hiring is off 20% from last year. He attributed that to slow transaction volumes and the ability for existing workers to do more with less due to AI.
“We're left with continued uncertainty and higher interest rates, which has resulted in a drop-off in transaction volume,” he said. “The other major events are the midterms and what’s going on in the Middle East. We’re not going to move through them overnight. These are significant blips. But we will get through them, and when we get into 2027, some of these things will be behind us in the rearview mirror, and there will be increased optimism in transaction volume and the associated bump in hiring.”
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