5 Questions To Ask in a Real Estate Interview

Asking questions during an interview can help you more clearly understand the role you’re in the running for, learn more about the company itself, and even make you a more attractive candidate when compared to other applicants.

So to make sure you’re prepared to go into round one with the right questions ready, this post covers five things to ask during a first-round commercial real estate interview, and why each of these questions is so important.

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Question #1: What’s the Target Pay Range for This Position?

The first thing that’s really important to get clear on in the first round of the interview process is something that all job candidates want to know as soon as possible (but don’t always ask), and this is the target pay range for the position you’re interviewing for.

If you’re way off on salary or bonus expectations from the start, you’ll want to know this up-front, instead of wasting weeks or months going down a path that’s ultimately going to lead to disappointment.

Why This Question Matters

This also helps you get ahead of the “What salary range are you expecting?” question that a lot of employers will ask candidates, which is especially helpful when their target is at or above what you would have ended up asking for.

This is also a great time to ask whether there are opportunities for profit sharing, co-investment, or any other forms of compensation or benefits that wouldn’t fall into the salary or bonus category.

One of the worst things you can do is to go through the entire interview process (which can often be 4-6 rounds or more), only to get an offer that isn’t anywhere close to what you’d need to be making to leave your current role.

This doesn’t mean that companies don’t ever come up from where they start a negotiation, and most firms will throw out numbers on the low end of the spectrum in an initial job offer just to see if you’ll bite. However, if your all-in pay target is something like $150,000, and the target pay range for the company is something like $90,000, in most cases, it usually doesn’t make sense to continue with the process.

Question #2: How Would You Describe This Company’s Culture?

The next thing I’d recommend asking as soon as possible (ideally to multiple people that you interview with) is, “How would you describe this company’s culture?”

You can often learn a lot about a company’s culture just by walking through the office and going through the standard interview process, but you’ll usually get a lot more clarity on this by asking the people you meet with how they would describe working for the firm.

Good Follow-Up Questions

Good questions to ask at this stage include things like:

• What’s your favorite part about working here?
• What’s something you wish you had known before joining the firm?
• What personality types have you seen among the most successful people within this organization?

The answers to these questions can give you clues into what your work life might be like on a day-to-day basis if you were to take the job, and these can also uncover some of the negatives of working at the company that you wouldn’t otherwise hear.

Red Flags to Watch For

If your personality type doesn’t align with what it takes to be successful internally, if the things people wish they knew before joining the company are major red flags to you, or the person you’re interviewing with doesn’t have a very convincing “favorite” part of their job, these are all things to consider during the interview process.

Question #3: What’s Your Long-Term Goal for the Person You’re Hiring?

The next thing I would ask in the first round of interviews is, “What’s your long-term goal for the person you’re hiring?”

This question can help you determine where you might be able to take this role internally if this ends up being a place you want to build your career, and this can also give you a sense of how the company sees you fitting into the team in the future.

Understanding Career Trajectory

Some analyst and associate roles are only designed to be 2-3 year positions, with a team of established senior professionals at the next level that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Other companies have a more formal analyst and associate career trajectory, where they plan to transition these people into more senior-level roles after a certain number of years.

Regardless of whether the answer you hear is good or bad, this question will give you another helpful data point to understand if you can grow within the company, if this is designed to be a dead-end job, or if this is a role that will lead you down a path that you ultimately don’t want to pursue.

This type of question also shows a hiring manager that you’re being intentional about your job search and you’d ideally like to build a career internally over time, which can often put you ahead of other candidates interviewing for the position.

Question #4: Should I Prepare for a Modeling Exam in Future Rounds?

The final two questions I’d recommend asking at this point are related to the rest of the interview process itself, and the first question is, “If I were to advance to future rounds of this process, should I prepare for a modeling exam?”

The answer to this will help you prioritize your time after round one, and this will also make sure you aren’t stressing out and cramming for an exam that you ultimately won’t be given.

In most cases, this question will also lead an employer to share a little bit more about what might be asked of you within a modeling test if this is expected to come up, including:

• General exam structure
• Any time constraints you might have
• Whether this would be a take-home test or an in-office exam

Technical exams are typically given in the last 1-2 rounds of the interview process, so by asking this question up front, you’ll often be giving yourself at least a few weeks to prepare.

Question #5: When Should I Expect to Hear About Next Steps?

The last question I’d recommend asking at this stage will help you manage your expectations during the most uncertain parts of this process, and this is, “When should I expect to hear more about next steps and whether I’ve advanced to the next round?”

This can give you a lot more peace of mind than you would have when waiting indefinitely for an unknown amount of time to hear back about the job, and this can also give you an excuse to follow up if you don’t end up hearing back in the timeframe you were given.

This doesn’t mean you should immediately start firing off emails to a recruiter or hiring manager the first day after they said they’d reach out, but if you haven’t heard from the company several days after they expected to make a decision, this is when it makes sense to ask for an update.

When you do this, you also want to make sure that your email is framed as a question (rather than a demand for an immediate decision), and an easy way to do this is to say something along the lines of, “I wanted to check in on next steps after our initial conversation and see if there’s anything else you need from me at this stage of the process.”

How To Prepare For Real Estate Interviews

If you want to make sure you’re prepared for real estate interviews and you’re ready to tackle an Excel modeling exam that might be given to you during the process, make sure to check out our all-in-one membership training platform, Break Into CRE Academy.

A membership to the Academy will give you instant access to over 120 hours of video training on real estate financial modeling and analysis, you’ll get access to hundreds of practice Excel interview exam questions, sample acquisition case studies, and you’ll also get access to the Break Into CRE Analyst Certification Exam, which covers topics like real estate pro forma and development modeling, commercial real estate lease modeling, equity waterfall modeling, and many other real estate financial analysis concepts that will help you prove to employers that you have what it takes to tackle the responsibilities of an analyst or associate at a top real estate firm.