Real Estate Degrees – What Matters (& What Doesn’t)

Whether you’re considering pursuing a real estate degree or you’re already in school with a different major (and wondering if you need to make a change), there are a lot of nuances to both of these situations that can be really tough to navigate.

So in this post, we’ll walk through what really matters when it comes to degrees in commercial real estate, and what is (and isn’t) necessary to break into this business.

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4-Year Degrees

The first thing I want to address here is that if you want to land a job at a top real estate firm, a 4-year degree is usually going to be necessary.

The vast majority of major real estate investment, development, brokerage, and lending firms will only consider candidates with at least a 4-year degree, so if you want to land an analyst or associate role working in real estate finance or investments, this is something to know going into the job search.

Fortunately, if this is something a company is looking for, a 4-year degree requirement will usually be included directly within a job posting, so you won’t have to guess if this is a must-have. However, if you submit an application to a job that requires this without a 4-year degree, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be invited in for an interview.

With that said, you absolutely don’t need to work at a big firm to be successful in commercial real estate, and there are a lot of people who have made a lot of money in this industry without going to college at all.

And if you can be flexible and stay open to working at a smaller, more entrepreneurial shop, there are opportunities out there that don’t have this requirement, but just be aware that not having a 4-year degree on your resume will typically narrow down your options quite a bit.

Your Major Matters Less Than You Think

The next thing worth mentioning is that you don’t need to have a degree in real estate to land a job in this industry.

A real estate major can be helpful to show your interest in the business and a general understanding of the core concepts of commercial real estate, but this isn’t a requirement in the vast majority of cases.

In fact, a lot of schools don’t even offer a formal real estate degree, and most incoming analyst and associate candidates have a bachelor’s degree in subjects like finance, economics, accounting, architecture, civil engineering, or even general business.

Most employers also know that a traditional academic curriculum doesn’t teach students the things they’ll need to know to be successful on the job, which makes the specific degree you chose to pursue a lot less relevant. As long as you’ve checked the box of a 4-year degree in general, companies tend to care a lot more about your knowledge of real estate finance and Excel, and how you can apply this to real estate investment analysis.

In many cases, to test your understanding of these things, companies will also end up giving candidates an Excel modeling exam, including a sample investment opportunity you’ll need to analyze, build a model for, and answer questions about. And in most cases, your performance on this test will be a lot more heavily weighted than the subjects you studied in college.

Where You Go to School Matters

Even though what you majored in won’t usually have a huge impact on your job prospects, where you go to school can play a major role in your success in commercial real estate, and this is in large part due to the network that a 4-year degree can help you build.

A lot of people end up landing internships or full-time jobs in this industry through alumni introductions and relationships with people that are directly connected to their school, and this means that where your alumni base is working can have a major impact on your overall job prospects.

This is true for both undergrad and grad school, and why you’ll often see the most successful real estate professionals come out of the same top programs. These people end up hiring each other, doing deals with each other, and investing in different opportunities together as a group.

If you’re choosing between schools right now, this is definitely something worth spending some time on, and one of the best ways I know of to get a sense of whether a program can help you get where you want to go is to research what alumni have done with their degrees.

For schools that are big enough, employment reports can be great sources of information on average salaries and bonuses, and also top companies that recruit at the school. And for smaller universities (or schools with relatively small real estate programs), LinkedIn can be a great resource to find out more about the careers that alumni have been able to build.

If you run an advanced LinkedIn search for people working in the “Real Estate” or “Leasing Non-Residential Real Estate” industries that are both alumni of the university and currently working in the city you want to live and work in after graduation, this will help you get a much clearer picture of whether a specific program can help you get to where you want to go.

Ideally, you’ll want to see a lot of alumni working at the types of companies you’d want to work for in the cities you’d want to end up in. And while talking to someone from the admissions office can be a great way to get more general information about each school, a LinkedIn search like this will give you a much more transparent answer to how each program can help you achieve your goals.

This will also make it very clear that where you go to school geographically can make a huge difference in where you end up. So while schools like NYU and Wharton often filter alumni into the New York City metro, and schools like USC and UCLA often help people land jobs in Southern California.

The bottom line here is that the network you’ll build through a 4-year degree can be just as valuable (if not more valuable) than the actual education you’d receive at a top university, and this is definitely something that’s worth paying very close attention to.

Building Technical Skills

The last thing I want to talk about in this post is that a 4-year degree usually won’t help you develop the technical skills you’ll need to land a job in commercial real estate.

Most university courses primarily focus on real estate investment theory, which is great for building critical thinking skills and a framework for analyzing different opportunities. However, when it comes to building the Excel knowledge and financial modeling skills you’ll need to be successful in this industry, this is usually something you’ll need to do almost entirely on your own.

This is a big reason why I started Break Into CRE and built the courses we have today, because I personally ran into this, even after getting an MBA and taking 8 different real estate classes during that 2-year period.

These skills are necessary not only to pass an Excel modeling exam during the interview process, but these are also necessary to help you do the things that will be required of you on a day-to-day basis in an analyst or associate role. Whether you need to build a pro forma to analyze a new acquisition opportunity, build a waterfall model to analyze a new partnership structure, or analyze different commercial leasing scenarios that your team might have to choose from, your technical skills will be a key part of succeeding in most jobs.

How To Break Into Commercial Real Estate

If you want to make sure you have the technical skills you’ll need to land internships and full-time job opportunities in commercial real estate after graduation, 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.