Although I’ve walked these streets a 100 times before, looking up made it feel like I was there for the first time. Most people, me included, are glued to their smart phones as they commute to work or run errands. Rarely do we appreciate the history and architecture that surrounds us each day.

Look Up New York is an awesome social media campaign celebrating New York City Architecture with the goal of educating and engaging New Yorkers in thoughtful and creative ways.

Each day for 90 days, Look Up New York tells the stories behind the city’s most notable buildings. Anyone can contribute to the campaign by posting photos to  Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #LookUpNY.

Visit the LookUpNY website to view submissions from Instagram and Twitter, see an interactive map of photos, and learn about the storied history of some of New York’s most fabled buildings.

When you’re out and about this week, I challenge you to #LookUpNY. Trust me, that posture changes everything.

For much of the senior spring semester I had a laser focus on obtaining a position within real estate finance or development. After countless informational interviews, that’s the only position where I thought I should be. The problem was that by mid-2008, the equity markets were frozen and new development had come to a screeching halt. I graduated with no position and had to revert to my fallback option – working with my uncle at a two man investment firm. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I learned about brokerage, construction, and property management, three pillars of the real estate business.

Sexy? No, but do I use the knowledge I obtained chatting with brokers, spending time on construction sites, and dealing with tenants, you bet.

The point is that you shouldn’t worry if your first job isn’t the sexiest, most sought after role. In real estate, there is no linear career path. To those seniors: Use your network and find a job. Don’t be picky; you can learn a lot in many varying settings.

When you inevitably do land a job, you should move vertically, horizontally and jump around within your own company, while being open to outside opportunities, if you want to be successful.

Make sure you don’t take yourself too seriously or think you are too good for any task. There’s a lot to learn.  You will make mistakes. Be willing to work hard, network, try to keep learning, and don’t ever accept it when somebody says do it because that’s the way it’s always been done. A big part of this blog is to get people to challenge assumptions. Using common sense is really the toughest thing to get people to learn.

Real estate can be a challenging and rewarding career path. So my advice to those who are graduating and want to be in real estate….find a way to get into real estate!

While Ben and Riggs are real estate practitioners who saw inefficiency in the business and set out to improve it, David is a non-real estate guy who’s shaking up the business.

Jason Freedman, founder of the offices space search firm 42 Floors, wrote an interesting article on Hacker News about the type of people working at 42 Floors. The first seven people hired by the company had a combined 0 years of commercial real estate experience. He saw this as a positive because he believes that in order to transform the real estate business, you need people who are not educated in how the industry has performed up until now. This was important to him because he’s not simply trying to improve the industry; he’s trying to flip it on its head.

This got me thinking about the current real estate tech landscape and the types of people who are shaking up the business. There are a few key areas where innovation is happening in real estate:

Data
While real estate companies have traditionally guarded data and services like Costar and Loopnet charged large fees to access information, start-ups such as Compstak are changing that model. Compstak, founded by a former real estate broker, uses a unique model to crowd-source lease information enabling real estate participants to easily compare properties.

Financing
Fundrise is just one of many start-ups which believe crowdfunding is the future of financing real estate deals. A recent Forbes article highlights 10 companies that are taking varying approaches to crowdfunding for real estate. This segment of innovation tends to be full of industry veterans who have a deep understanding of real estate and how the financing landscape has evolved over time. There’s a good article over on the Fundrise blog which explains how big money took over real estate and why crowdfunding is key to realigning interests.

Search
While 42 Floors was started by non-real estate guys, their competitor, TheSquareFoot, was started by a few savvy young real estate professionals. Each takes the similar approach to office search with the mission of improving the way companies find office space.

Real Estate versus Non-Real Estate
Many real estate start-ups are run by former real estate professionals because they see the inefficiencies first-hand and understand the intricacies of the business that need to be improved. However, most real estate professionals are old-school thinkers; they do things a certain way because that’s how they were taught and that’s how those before them were taught. This leads to a business that lacks innovative thinkers.

For this reason, guys like Jason Freedman who see the world in a different light, can successfully shake up the business while having no prior real estate experience. However, before starting 42 Floors, he had to learn the business. He spent a lot of time speaking with tenants, brokers, and landlords. He went on tours and read through leases. After all, it was this deep understanding of the flaws of the business that has enabled him to successfully shake up the business.

What do you think?

My knowledge of the current hiring environment is mainly hearsay. So I reached out to three college seniors who’ve successfully navigated the hiring market and landed jobs with top tier real estate firm and asked them to share their advice.

Here’s what they had to say:

Michael Chen is a senior at UPENN who’s landed a job with a top real estate fund in New York

A quick background on myself, I went through summer internship recruiting my junior year and ultimately interned with a real estate group at a lifeco. It was a phenomenal experience in which I worked in portfolio and asset management as well as acquisitions. At the beginning of senior year, I recruited with opportunistic funds and will be starting this summer.

My first piece of advice is to know your story and how it connects to real estate. The goal of the interviewer is to determine who you are and whether you are truly interested in real estate. Expect the “why real estate” question. The typical answer is that it is tangible, i.e. you can kick the tires on a building. This is unlikely to set you apart. Spend some time figuring out why you like real estate and find a way to articulate that interest preferably using real estate terminology. Remember that a story that is coherent and flows logically will 1) help interviewers learn who you are, 2) show that your interests are refined, and 3) establish that you can communicate effectively.

Second, review your real estate class notes or pick up a book on real estate valuation. Real estate is a relatively simple asset class. While there are many ways to make it complicated, interviews are usually kept simple. Know the metrics: cap rates, NOI, IRR, LTV, DSCR, etc. You should be able to tick off the lines on a typical cash flow statement. In terms of valuation, you will likely be given simple cases where you will need to start with NOI and end with BTCF. Make sure you are comfortable and fast with simple arithmetic. For fulltime, excel modeling cases will be given so know how to build a simple LBO model from scratch and then actually time yourself when you practice a few times (tests usually run for 1-1.5 hours).

Third, when you attend final round interviews, you may be doing up to 10 interviews with 20 different people in a day. If you have any time between interviews, stand up, stretch, take a bathroom break, do something that will reset and calm your mind. Interviewing is a stressful process and you can end up going through the motions or tripping on your own words. If you’re telling your story in monotone with little enthusiasm, you can imagine what the interviewer is thinking.

Fourth, interview for everything and be selective only after you have an offer in hand. This is pretty self-explanatory; you do not want to be left without a summer internship or fulltime job. If you are interested solely in real estate private equity, know that there are many paths to it. If you cannot get where you want right now, make sure whatever position you take will lend itself to your ultimate goal in terms of skillset and experience.

Finally, if you are fortunate enough to have a few offers in hand, make your decision for the right reasons. For summer internships, the experience outweighs both brand and compensation. If you want to be a deal person, do not settle for an asset management position just because it is a brand name firm. The experience will be different and fulltime interviewers are cognizant of this. For fulltime offers, come up with your own metrics and pick the offers apart. Some of the metrics I focused on were track record, capital, culture fit, training, group structure, brand, compensation, and location.

Jackson Brissette is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Real Estate, Finance, and International Business

The good news is that I have seen a significant volume increase in hiring this year. With that being said it is still extremely competitive and simply applying online will not get you the job 99% of the time. Private equity shops, top brokerage firms, and Real Estate Investment Banking groups run very lean operations. You need to do something else besides simply applying on your University’s career page.

My advice is to reach out to your contacts before you hit the “apply” button. For example, I have a mentor in Chicago who has been a great source of knowledge and connections. I usually reach out to him before I apply, especially if the firm is in Chicago. Do your best to get in front of an Associate, schedule an “informal” phone call, or correspond via email with someone from the firm before you apply. This will put you at a distinct advantage to your peers if and when you actually get the interview. Use your professors, friends in the industry, family, mentors, previous employers, etc.

Take any opportunity to speak with someone in the industry; you never know when the contact will be useful. My other advice is to show your passion at all times. Figure out why you love real estate and then demonstrate that passion. Start a blog, go on a tour of a real estate development, take a modeling course, participate in a case competition, and most importantly read about deals going on in the industry.

Sam Ross is a senior at Tufts who’s secured a job with a top real estate investment firm in Chicago

Searching for a job was a full-time job. My approach was to develop a strategy, target companies to contact, and network with anyone I knew in real estate or finance. The process was a grind and I had to constantly refine my strategy. After months of networking, opportunities began to emerge until I landed a job. My advice to any senior is to network relentlessly. Each conversation is an opportunity to sell yourself and why you want to be in the real estate. I found the more I networked, the luckier I was.

There’s some great advice here. While the over-arching message is to network your ass off, there’s certain skills and knowledge you must have, and most importantly a passion for the business you must have, to successfully land a job in real estate. Keep learning, networking, and being curious – you’re bound to find a job you love.

Here’s another post that I think you’ll find useful – how to land a job in real estate while still in college

One sector of the market which has seen a lot of hiring activity is CMBS. It was very timely that Kevin Flammia reached out to me noting that he had just transferred into the CMBS group of a major investment bank. I asked Kevin to share a bit about the process of breaking into CMBS and his experience thus far.

Enter Kevin:

I graduated from the University of Delaware with an Honors BS in Mathematics and Economics and an MS in Finance.  During my undergraduate tenure, I interned at a federal securities regulator the summers after my sophomore and junior year.  This experience was excellent as it provided me insight as to how regulators were viewing the fallouts of the financial crises and the main issues that needed to be addressed.  However, I wanted to round out my experience and deal with the same issues, but rather from the market’s standpoint.

Due to the large press coverage and inquiry into the secondary market for mortgages and other structured products, I was vying for a position in securitization.  In terms of the recruiting process, my experience was very non-traditional in the sense I did not intern at the bank in the prior summer and was not recruited through on campus recruiting.  There was plenty of legwork that went into networking and learning about the business as much as I could.  Eventually, I landed a phone interview with a bulge bracket bank, followed by a second round, which was six separate interviews.  The next step was a follow-up, face-to-face interview with the team I would be working with directly.  The overall interview process was not overtly technical due to the fact that the knowledge they expected me to have to structured finance was somewhat limited.  All questions were general finance questions and the concept of the waterfall cash-flow mechanism that is embedded in asset-backs and mortgage-backs.

I started off in the consumer ABS business, but was soon exposed to the CMBS market due to group consolidation.  I eventually concluded that the story of individual properties and the heavy reliance upon real estate, rather than pure stratifications was more appealing to me.  I began my path into integrating myself into the group.  In trying to secure a position in a group that did not have any available headcount at the time, I began volunteering after hours to assist the Capital Markets group.  I opted for this group due to the fact that they represent the epicenter of the real estate and bond market, as well as the need for the group members to understand both the process of how the lenders underwrites mortgages to how to create the most appealing products to meet investors demand.  Additionally, I was drawn to the opportunity to dig into real estate, which was an aspect that sparked an interest in me immediately.

The experience so far has been very educational because of the array of information I am forced to deal with on a daily basis.  Whether it is discussing the credit qualities of a tenant of a stand-alone retail property to deciding which class of bonds the market has the most appetite for and working with the rating agencies to optimize the integration of our note into the marketplace, there is always something new to be learned or a different strategy to consider.  As a junior member of the team, there is substantial grunt work to be done, including drafting the offering documents, weekly market updates, responding to rating agency, b-piece and investment grade investors, compiling data tapes, etc., but the process teaches the fundamentals of how the securitization process works and what is to be expected from all standpoints.  Eventually, the role lends itself to more client interaction and relationship management, including pitching the bonds and underlying loans to a variety of investors, to negotiating pool composition with B-piece buyers.

In the upcoming months, I am focusing on effectuate my experience in my current position and fully grasping the underlying concepts and trends of the industry before I begin business school in the fall.

If you have any questions for Kevin feel free to leave them in the comments below.