Our Approach
If you’re a college student or graduate student looking to break into the real estate industry, switching careers into the real estate space, or already in the industry and looking to take your career to the next level, you’re in the right place.
Meet Your Instructor
Justin Kivel, Founder
Welcome to Break Into CRE!
If you don't know me already, my name is Justin Kivel, and I’m a real estate professional turned teacher and the founder of Break Into CRE. After almost a decade of working with and for some of the largest institutions in the commercial real estate industry in acquisitions, asset management, investment sales, and lending roles, I set out to teach what I had learned through working on over $1.5 billion of closed transactions across multifamily, retail, office, industrial, and mixed-use properties.
When I was first getting started in the industry back in 2012, information was much harder to come by than it is today.
Excel courses and real estate courses both existed, but I couldn’t find anything that blended the two topics and could teach me both the technical skills I needed to land a job in CRE and the practical skills I needed to do my own deals, ideally in an easy-to-understand format that didn’t require a ton of Excel or real estate knowledge to get started.
But after scouring the internet for months, I couldn’t find anything that fit what I was looking for, and I ended up having to learn these things the hard way on my own. And after a while, through on-the-job trial and error, far too many “sink-or-swim” scenarios, and all-too-patient mentors and managers taking the time to answer my questions, I finally started to get the hang of this whole “real estate” thing.
At this point, I took a look back at the challenges I'd worked through and the things I'd experienced, and I couldn't help but think that there must have been a better way.
I started to take phone calls and coffee meetings with college students and aspiring real estate professionals looking to do what I had done, and I kept hearing the same questions over and over again – the same exact questions I was asking when I was first getting started in the real estate industry.
So to help people in the same position I was in just a few years earlier, I set out to create the resource I wish I had when I was first starting out. The goal was to teach everything I’d learned in the trenches through working on hundreds of deals with some of the smartest and most accomplished real estate investors in the industry, in a way that felt approachable, practical, and actually made sense.
I started with one course. And then another. And then another.
Fast forward to today, and we have have 20 courses on our platform and have helped over 80,000 students land their dream jobs at some of the top real estate investment, development, and brokerage firms across the globe, including Brookfield Asset Management, Hines, Starwood Capital Group, LaSalle Investment Management, PGIM, Eastdil Secured, JLL, CBRE, and many, many more.
So whatever that next step in your real estate career looks like, we're here to help you get there as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Check out the free Break Into CRE Real Estate Financial Modeling Crash Course below for a sneak peek into what our training is all about.
Take Our Training For A
Test Drive
Learn the three pillars of real estate financial modeling & how to analyze deals on autopilot
