REITs: The Basics

Welcome to the concrete jungle

Real Estate is boring. That’s what I really thought. After spending a summer leafing through government leasing documents that was pretty clear. Checking page after page for signatures, entering rent figures into excel, and trying to understand tenant improvements did not get my blood pumping. A 19-year-old needs more action, more excitement. So at the end of the summer I steered myself away from real estate and towards any other career path, hoping for something that was more dynamic. Maybe I could learn to trade biotech stocks… that would be exciting!

It was 8 years and 2 jobs later before I officially confirmed the naiveté of my 19-year-old self. I found myself sitting in a conference room across the table from the world’s top real estate CEO’s, discussing multi hundred million dollar development deals, portfolio acquisitions, and stock or bond offerings. At my desk I could watch their stock prices tick up and down throughout the day, as investors moved huge amounts of capital into and out of these companies. It was abundantly clear that this type of real estate was not boring. In fact it was extremely high stakes, with multi-million square foot properties changing hands in single deals, large mergers and acquisitions of companies, multi-billion dollar IPO’s, and bigtime egos clashing and competing.

I had truly entered the concrete jungle, and for a 27-year-old nerdy quant analyst it was both exciting and terrifying....