'You Sure You Want To Do This?’: Rookie Office Brokers Pursue CRE Careers Despite Downturn

There’s an existential crisis facing the office market, with phrases like “urban doom loop” and “office-to-residential conversions” becoming commonplace. That environment might seem like an unfavorable one for young adults looking to start a career. 

But many early career brokers who spoke with Bisnow said they felt energized by the chance to hone skills during a downturn, despite the increased competition and widely acknowledged financial hardships of starting out in CRE. In conversations with nine young office brokers, many of whom entered CRE since the pandemic, and a few in their older 20s and early 30s with some experience, most saw great opportunity and excitement despite the difficulties.

“You can have the highest high and the lowest lows within 20 minutes of each other,” said Orlando, Florida-based Foundry Commercial office brokerage associate Maria Lombardi, a 24-year-old who graduated college in 2022.

Lombardi was the only one of her 48 classmates in her master’s real estate program at the University of Florida who went into office.

“My classmates asked me, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Is this the route you want to go?’” she said.

There is also widespread agreement that the financial challenges of launching a career as an office broker haven’t gotten any better. 

“I would say it's more difficult,” William O’Daly, 31, a San Francisco-based associate for Avison Young, said about the challenge of starting right now. “There are less transactions, which makes it much more competitive.”

Despite the challenging office landscape and the befuddlement some contemporaries have over pursuing commercial real estate — one broker said her friends asked if the job was “like Selling Sunset,” the popular Netflix show about pricey LA homes — most of the younger brokers Bisnow spoke to were sanguine, if not energized, by the state of the market. 

The downturn didn’t scare off Nate Hruby, 30, a retired Air Force officer who became a tenant rep broker for Stream Realty Partners’ Dallas office in 2021. Regardless of whether he enters during a good or bad run for commercial real estate, it’s a cyclical market, and he still needs to spend three to five years honing his skills.  

“I was surprised to learn just how it's just a matter of grit and persistence,” he said of the role. “That's the hardest part.”

Like Hruby, many saw this moment as one to build connections and build lasting impressions by helping clients navigate tough times. Time is on their side to build trust and relationships in an uncertain market. 

“This is the only market I know,” said Claire Koeppel, 23, an associate who works for Newmark in New York City. “This is the exact time where young brokers should be forging new relationships and opening doors that will then help them once the market picks back up.

“In my generation, we're on our phones all the time anyway. I'm not complaining about always being on. I actually enjoy it.”

For many, there is a sense that real estate helps tap into their entrepreneurial spirit. Joe Conner, a 32-year-old first-year broker in Colliers’ Seattle office, left a marketing and management career at Starbucks and Nike, where he worked on campaigns for famous shoes like the Air Force 1.

After a friend suggested he try out CRE, Conner was initially turned off by what he thought was a “super salesy” position. But then the risk and reward of commissions hooked him. He has even tried to make up for lost time by taking a crash course in real estate via ChatGPT, asking the AI program to fill him in on industry terminology and financials.

“Your success, it’s up to you,” he said. “I came from a corporate environment where you’d get these reviews that said you did really, really well, but there’s no promotions, no ability for us to pay you more, so just keep doing what you’re doing for multiple years. Here, you get empowered, but it comes with a lot of stress.”

Consensus suggests that, optimism aside, the beginnings for anybody in this industry are rocky. Many young brokers spoke of the grind, taking calls whenever they come in and working 10-hour days, often more than more senior members of their team and doing whatever it takes, no matter how challenging or how small the initial reward. Others said that due to the low deal volume, tenant representation has become especially competitive. Brokers needed to be relentlessly focused on their clients to keep them from being poached. 

Isabella Zelinger, 29, who started in 2020 and is now a senior adviser at Cresa, said brokers need to “check their egos at the door” and “work on anything that’s thrown their way.” 

“I think a lot of younger brokers look at the successful players who have been at it for 30 years and ask how they get there,” she said. “It’s mostly about having the grit not to leave. It’s a game of ‘can you weather it?’”

Side Gigs Despite 'Investment Banking Hours'

A big part of the grind is the challenge of making it on a beginning broker salary, especially with the recent escalation in the cost of living. Brokers tend to focus on a combination of agency work, when they represent a building looking for tenants, or on tenant representation, helping someone find space. Most young brokers are adept in both, and skills are fungible. But in a market with fewer deals, it can be that much harder to earn a commission.

“I do have friends who aren’t going to the rooftop bar on a Saturday and coming up with an excuse because they’re trying to hold on to their cash,” Zelinger said. “The reality is that you've got to put food on the table. I think we're going to lose a lot of talent just because of the circumstances.”

Young office brokers typically start off with either a draw — prepaid commissions that need to be paid back if sales numbers aren’t reached — or small salaries, often augmented with commissions. The challenge of making it is longstanding, leading many young workers without connections or support to drop out before they are able to build up enough of a book of business to be self-sustaining. Many repeated the “eat what you kill” cliché about the job. They had enough of a salary to pay for necessities, but it was certainly stressful to make ends meet and served as a strong incentive to close deals and “stay hungry.”

Hannah Hutchins, 29, a broker with Stream in Dallas who previously served as a recruiter for the firm for two years, said it was a real challenge finding talent. Young applicants don’t really know what they are signing up for, she said: long hours and low pay with the potential for six-figure income in a few years, but only if you make it through those first few years. Roughly half of those she hired dropped out within the first two years, she said, and “the highest dropout rate that we've seen was in the last three years.”

“It’s frustrating, for sure,” said Micah Gray, 25, a former college football player working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for NAI Sun Vista. “You do all this work, put in time and energy and effort and really long days just for a very small commission. But it's part of the learning curve, and we try to put one foot in front of the other.”

When Avison Young’s O’Daly started in CRE in 2016 in Phoenix at the boutique firm Lee & Associates, he spent his first two years with a very small salary — he declined to give specifics — that necessitated side gigs and work at a restaurant. He was still regularly working 10-hour days, including at least one day on weekends, which added up to weeks of 60 hours of work or more, what he called “investment banking hours.” 

That difficulty of making ends meet is one reason O’Daly, who didn’t have any links to the industry, said he is seeing more young people in recent years coming into the industry with family or friend connections to real estate. 

'You Can’t Be Successful At 40 Hours A Week'

There are many reasons many young adults don’t end up in office brokerage. Those interested in real estate tend to see analyst roles or busier sectors like industrial as more promising. Part of that can also be blamed on schools and universities not prioritizing real estate as a career option. David Horwitz, vice president of DLC Management Corp., which focuses on retail properties, said after years of recruiting college students, he has found that most real estate programs bifurcate students, pushing them toward either the analytical or sales tracks, pushing some away from brokerages.

Of course, most schools don’t even offer real estate as a major. Koeppel, who graduated from the University of Virginia in spring 2022, said many classmates were steered toward banking and consulting.

“People just didn’t know enough about this industry,” she added. 

But there are also simply fewer brokers being hired right now. According to Avison Young principal and U.S. President Harry Klaff, brokerages are putting the brakes on hiring, mostly due to lack of demand. There isn't a lack of interest in joining the business. Per AY records, the firm hired 41 brokers nationwide under the age of 34 in 2018 and 64 more in 2019. But that has decreased steadily year-over-year amid the pandemic, on par with overall hiring by the firm: 37 in 2020, 33 in 2021 and 21 in 2022. This year, as of the end of August, the firm had hired 20.

The cost for firms to hire young brokers isn’t that substantial, especially compared to more expensive experienced talent. Hiring has simply slowed. 

But it hasn't stopped entirely, in part, Klaff said, because “young brokers tend to be the business development engines for real estate brokerage firms.” They are cold calling, walking buildings and getting out in the market, aspects of the job that always bring value, even in a down market. 

Some believe locating leads is one aspect of the job that is actually easier for young brokers now. Utilizing a new crop of CRE databases to find potential leads is very common, and many younger brokers said LinkedIn was one of their favorite tools. The platform’s Sales Navigator tool, which basically functions like Salesforce integrated into a social network, can be very helpful for leads. 

That said, it is still a tight job market, and Klaff said the firm needed to be competitive when it came to offering mentorship opportunities, a “people-first” culture and competitive pay. He said compensation packages varied considerably between offices, roles and individuals, spanning from salary to straight draw to various combinations. Klaff said he hoped a starting broker working in the Washington, D.C., market, where he is based, would make $100K annually by the end of their first two years. 

Can you be a successful young broker working 40 to 50 hours a week?

“You probably can't be that successful at 40 hours a week, like you can't be a successful attorney as a young associate at 40 hours a week,” Klaff said.

“There's just so much to learn,” he added. “It doesn't mean you won't be successful at some point in your career, but let's say that the pace of your success might be delayed.” 

Others said they have noticed firms altering hiring strategies to meet the down market. 

Cresa’s Zelinger said part of corporate strategy is being more selective about new hires, looking for those who show signs of being good business developers, as well as those whose parents are local, allowing them to move home and save money. She said that is part of the reason pushes for diversity within the industry have stalled and will take a long time to pay off: If this was a fully salaried business, it would be that much easier to hire and retain workers from more disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds. 

'There’s Not A Book You Can Read That’ll Tell You How To Do This Job'

Despite significant market headwinds and the financial difficulties of making it today, most of the young brokers Bisnow spoke to said they were optimistic about their futures and felt their investment was paying off. Those with five or more years in the business underscored how vital it was to join good teams and find mentorship opportunities within their firms. 

“To be successful, you need to be in as many pitches and as many conversations as you possibly can in order to get experience,” Hutchins said. “[Older brokers] need to let them kind of look over their shoulder as you’re signing a lead. What do you look for? What are the gotchas? That’s the only way. There’s not a book that you can read that’ll tell you how to do this job.”

That learning curve is why, for all the promise of making substantial salaries as a somewhat self-directed, entrepreneurial free agent, the role of office broker doesn’t have nearly the cultural recognition or cachet as working for a startup, Hutchins said. Most of the young brokers said this is a role that you have to be wired for, though it is fair to question whether that would be different if it was easier to get a start in the industry. 

“Everybody wants to have overnight success, but you have to be prepared to wait on that success,” Hruby said. “And frankly, that’s kind of still where I am. I don't know that I've made it, but you have to just be willing to keep the faith.”