If Somebody Is Just Starting Their Career In Real Estate Development, What Would Be Your Suggestion On How To Learn The Business The Fastest Way Possible?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

Working with skilled and experienced organizations allows those just starting out to fast track their education while still building a successful and positive foundation. Rather than spending three years to get the equivalent of one year of education, you’re reversing that and getting three years of learning in the span of a single year. Choosing the organizations you’re working with wisely makes all the difference. 

Richard Wilson: My next question is about if somebody is just starting their career in real estate development what would be your suggestion on how to learn the business the fastest way possible? I think you kind of halfway answered it just there about, you know, joining a firm that has a lot of experience and is growing quickly or has a lot of success and getting mentored for five or ten years at one of those types of firms. I’m sure that would be part of your answer. Is there anything else you would add to that for somebody looking to start their real estate development career? 

David Greer: You know, starting out on the development side, I think organizations are important. There’s a lot of different trade organizations out there that you can become involved with. Attending those meetings regularly to build your network but also hear about other people’s experiences, different case studies, whatever, you know, there’s many different parts and processes to real estate development and understanding each of those and finding expertise in each of those areas is really important before you just strike out and try to develop something. You can do it that way, but you can make a lot of mistakes, too. And I think one of the things that we talked is that we have new individuals and people we add to the team here at Moss is you’re either going to get one years of experience in three years, or you can get three years of experience in one year. And we do that, we accelerate that, learning curve and growth by getting people involved in different organizations, a lot of training, and a lot of different items that will further their education in a much quicker fashion then just the traditional method of getting out there and trying to learn on the fly. 

Richard: Right. Right, yeah, makes sense.