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Can anyone share some light about what a real estate transactional practice is like at a V50? Is real estate a good practice area? Pros and cons? Long term exit ops? Thanks!

BK + RE are boom/bust practices. You will spend your whole career feasting and famining.

Anonymous User wrote:BK + RE are boom/bust practices. You will spend your whole career feasting and famining.

Nether of those practices are boom/bust. What an odd post.

I am also interested in this post.

Interested as well!

Related question: is there a significant difference in quality of work and exit ops between a band 1 and a band 3 or 4 real estate finance practice?

Bump

Also interested

There has to be someone with a knowledgeable opinion

make sure to research heavily the type of RE a firm does before you join. RE can be just a support group for M&A - i.e. dealing with the acquisitions where the target happens to own some buildings which are being transferred, and the RE team is just there to facilitate that portion of the deal. kind of like the benefits group is just there to facilitate the transfer of employees/benefits within the deal. here you are just a support team. then you have RE groups who do their own deals - basically like an M&A deal but the whole deal IS the real estate. think like an acquisition of hotels or something for blackstone's real estate fund. here the real estate team is actually running the deal. this can be pretty bad hours from what I understand. then you have like dirt law which I'm not sure what is but many top firms seem to do it. in sum, experience in real estate can vary greatly firm by firm so think critically about what type of RE you want to do.

ruski wrote:make sure to research heavily the type of RE a firm does before you join. RE can be just a support group for M&A - i.e. dealing with the acquisitions where the target happens to own some buildings which are being transferred, and the RE team is just there to facilitate that portion of the deal. kind of like the benefits group is just there to facilitate the transfer of employees/benefits within the deal. here you are just a support team. then you have RE groups who do their own deals - basically like an M&A deal but the whole deal IS the real estate. think like an acquisition of hotels or something for blackstone's real estate fund. here the real estate team is actually running the deal. this can be pretty bad hours from what I understand. then you have like dirt law which I'm not sure what is but many top firms seem to do it. in sum, experience in real estate can vary greatly firm by firm so think critically about what type of RE you want to do.

I was about to say this same thing. Choose a firm that has a stand-alone real estate practice.

Anonymous User wrote:Related question: is there a significant difference in quality of work and exit ops between a band 1 and a band 3 or 4 real estate finance practice?

The skills you gain will be similar. The quality of work and exit opps would be different, mostly as a result of different clients you work with (for instance Vornado and Goldman for S&C).

Assuming OP is interested in a standalone RE finance practice, can you extrapolate on the quality of that experience?

interested as well

Bump

Anonymous User wrote:BK + RE are boom/bust practices. You will spend your whole career feasting and famining.

Are these groups any more cyclical than M&A or transactional practices generally? To some degree they all seem like they can be up and down depending on where the economy is

"Real estate transactions" can actually mean a variety of things, but generally, a good real estate transactional practice will involve a lot of support for (shockingly) real estate transactions. Let's say your firm represents a developer who wants to build an apartment complex in City X. City X has limited amount of land to buy that's appropriate for the use intended by the client. The client comes in and says "we have decided that Parcel A is the one we want and have a deal to buy for $25,000,000. Please start the process." Depending on how involved the client wants you to be, that could mean starting with a title history and going all the way through drafting the sales agreements and possibly assisting with due diligence.

For instance, let's say Parcel A was formerly owned by an electric company who had a warehouse there. That warehouse has a cellular antenna lease with AT&T that still has 20 years left on the lease. If the cell tower is on a building that's going to be demolished, does the client have the right to demolish the building or to ask AT&T to move or leave? That's a pretty big consideration if you're about to spend $25,000,000 on a piece of land - you want to make sure you can do what you need to with it.

And a sales agreement for a $25,000,000 commercial purchase is infinitely more complicated than an agreement for you to buy a house. Sometimes the attorneys will draft purchase agreements and then also prepare agreements for the development of the land. The lender for the purchase of the property is going to have all sort of steps and hoops to jump through that's part of the closing.

As a junior associate, you'll probably get stuck with the crap work - chain of title histories and the like. Which basically means poring over the entire chain of title for the property and making sure that nothing sticks out - did everyone who ever sold the property have the legal right to do so? Has the property ever been conveyed by two separate owners who both thought they had legal right to title (it happens more than you think)? Are there any deed restrictions from 1934 that might impact your client's options with developing the land? How many old deeds for one chain of title can you find that have racist restrictions?

The more experience you get, the more interesting stuff you get to look at - purchase agreements, or perhaps other existing agreements affecting the land. Do any of them impact your client's ability to do whatever they want? What does the lender require and how can you speed things up? And so on. As you get more senior, you move into actually drafting purchase agreements and the various documents associated with the closing.

I never worked at a V50 or V10 or whatever arbitrary cutoff you want to choose, but I would imagine the main difference in the work is the complexity of the deal. A smaller firm will get Uncle Billy's car lot business trying to purchase some additional land next door for $1,000,000. A good sized firm might represent local medium sized businesses on purchases - maybe for $10,000,000. Your top-end firms will represent your J.P. Morgans buying a batch of 100 properties, or perhaps Toyota in acquiring their new Texas campus.

Anonymous User wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:BK + RE are boom/bust practices. You will spend your whole career feasting and famining.

Nether of those practices are boom/bust. What an odd post.

BK and RE are pretty cyclical. If the economy is good, most people aren't declaring bankruptcy and they are doing real estate deals. If the economy sucks, the opposite is true. My older firm's real estate practice almost went completely under in 2008-2009.