I have started to meet with developers for my new book – becoming a real estate developer – and I can’t begin to tell you how impressive and inspiring it is to learn about their stories.
It’s easy to look at someone who is successful and feel overwhelmed by everything they’ve accomplished. But nobody starts at the top of their game (unless maybe they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth). Usually there’s a backstory of sweat and struggle that rarely gets told. As the saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
But those are exactly the kinds of things I hope to uncover with this little project. I am less interested in the successes and more interested in the early decisions, struggles, and thoughts that went into making those successes even possible.
And one thing I’ve noticed is a tendency to just go for it. In fact, when I asked one developer if he had any advice for young aspiring developers, he said: just fucking do it.
As soon as he said this I couldn’t help but think of my elementary school English teacher who used always tell us the same thing – minus the expletive – whenever we’d ask him something such as, how long should this paper be, should we focus on this or that, and so on. He would always say: What does Nike say? Just do it. No buts. Just do it.
As a result of writing Architect This City, I’m fortunate enough to receive a lot of emails from random people. But I’m always open to meeting new people, and so I enjoy this very much.
One of the most common questions I get is from architects, and students of architecture, who want to know about transitioning over to real estate development. (Posts related to this topic also happen to be some of my most popular.)
So today I thought I would share a story with all of you about the one decision that ultimately lead me into real estate development.
When I started graduate architecture school, I already had inklings that I was going to get into development. That’s one of the main reasons why I went to Penn. I knew that I could concentrate in real estate and I knew that I could take courses over at the business school. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
But during my first year, I still wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to reconcile this dual interest. In fact, I remember feeling really conflicted. I loved architecture and design, but I also really enjoyed business and entrepreneurship. I was also interested in making money, and architecture isn’t often the best place to do that.
Last night I received an email from a 27 year old woman in Virginia Beach that really made my day. With her permission, I am sharing that email in full here on the blog, but redacting her identity. Here it is:
Brandon,
You don’t know me, but I just wanted to take a moment and say, thank you. I am a 27 year-old woman living and working in Virginia Beach, VA, with a Civil Engineering degree from Virginia Tech. Up until recently, I have been trying to “find myself” in my career with little success. I always had a feeling that I was “meant to do something” with my career. The problem was that I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do.
Anyway, fast-forward to November 2016, and I decided to start applying to real estate development companies in the area. After all, it seemed like a pretty cool job. I began sending random emails to a few companies to see if they would hire me…. There wasn’t a real position open - I sort of just begged. Through all my random internet searches, I happened to find your blog one day… And to be honest, you have become a great inspiration to me.
I began to love real estate development. Not just normal development, I want to make a difference. I began to feel excited and passionate about a science, a line of work, and an end vision and goal that several people share. I want to build these wonderful, competitive, beautiful, sustainable cities. I want to make our world better and more beautiful one place at a time. I was finally able to find myself through your work, so I thank you. You have helped me to commit to a career switch, be patient with my job hunt, and apply for an MBA program.
Thank you for doing what inspires you because by doing it, you are also inspiring this crazy girl down in Virginia Beach! Keep it up.
I wanted to share this email for two reasons.
One, if you’re a firm in the Virginia Beach area, you should consider meeting her for a coffee. Send me an email and I’ll forward it along to her. It’s always challenging breaking into a new industry.
And two, her email does a great job illustrating how important it is for people to feel fulfilled with their work. People want to make a difference. And some would argue that this desire is even more pronounced in the next generation coming up and entering the workforce.
I feel lucky that I love what I do. And I know that many of my colleagues feel the same way.
Sometimes my friends in the development business will say to me that it’s hard not to become cynical and jaded over time. You start out wanting to change cities for the better and you think you’re doing the right thing, but then it feels like you’re getting punched in the gut every step of the way trying to do exactly that.
That’s what life will do to you every now and then: It will punch you in the gut. If you want to accomplish great things, you have to take those. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to take them when you’re fulfilled by the work you do.
Trying to build better cities is pretty damn fulfilling. I am sure that many of you would agree, regardless of what side of the industry you happen to be on.
At the time, I obviously didn’t give this much thought. But the fact of the matter is there’s so much value in doing. And it’s easy to overthink at the expense of doing. What he was teaching us was to have confidence in ourselves that we would figure it out along the way.
The reason there appears to be a lot of interest in “how to be a real estate developer” is because there isn’t really a set path. You don’t go to school, apprentice for a year under the wing of a developer and then, boom, you’re a developer.
Most developers have carved their own paths. They just did it.
So for my first summer internship, I decided to apply to both architecture firms and to real estate developers. I was fortunate enough to be offered jobs in both. And on the architecture side, I actually got my top choice, which was the Bjarke Ingels Group in Copenhagen. To this day, Bjarke remains one of my favorite practicing architects.
But when I looked at the numbers, I quickly realized that real estate developers were prepared to pay me about 3x more than any architect would and that, if I were going to take an architecture job, I was going to end up going more in debt just to live throughout the summer.
While internships are often career loss leaders, I took this as a sign of things to come. This was a 10 or 20 year decision in my mind. And even though I loved architecture, I figured I would quickly fall out of love with it if I couldn’t pay my bills or live the lifestyle that I wanted.
So I accepted a real estate job and I moved to Dublin, Ireland for the summer to work for a small consultancy called Urban Capital (no relationship to the Toronto firm of the same name). And I haven’t looked back since.
This may not have been the right decision for some of you, but it was for me. So if you’re at a crossroads, my advice is always to think about where you’d ideally like to be in 10 or 20 years. Because once you establish that, it’ll become much easier to make that decision today.
