EDITOR’S COMMENT Between my two children, a team of young reporters and my obsession with collecting obsolete physical media such as CDs and DVDs, I have plenty of opportunities to feel quite old.
But with age comes experience, right? I remember the global financial crisis of 2007-09, predictably, like it was yesterday. As a young-ish writer at a financial magazine, I listened with a mixture of fear and fascination as older colleagues told me, in no uncertain terms, that shit was about to get real. And it did.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and ushered in a very different kind of crisis, many industry players speaking with EG noted that their younger colleagues had never known anything like it. And the same can be said as we enter a new period of economic unrest and a likely recession.
What do you gain when you cut your teeth during a time of turmoil? I thought about that question this week when I spoke with William Beardmore-Gray, Knight Frank’s group chair, about the agency’s new cohort of more than 80 graduates. It’s the biggest intake the firm has ever welcomed. But what a time to be entering the world of work.
Knight Frank’s top dog won’t mind me saying he has been around the block during more than three decades with the firm (he said he had “an almost out-of-body experience” when he told the assembled grads that it had been that long). Multiple market crises. Good times followed by bad, followed by good again, and so on.
So I asked him what newcomers would gain from entering the industry during such a tumultuous time.
“We do our best work in difficult times,” he said. “It’s when our clients need us most. The pandemic was a great example, where we hunkered down with our clients. Those people who had been through the global financial crisis knew this was the time you needed to be sitting as close to your clients as possible, helping them and not expecting any reward – that reward comes a year or two down the line because you spent that time.”
That’s a valuable lesson to learn early in your career, he added. “There’s a whole generation of people, either advisers or clients, who have never seen a downturn. If you started in the past 12 years, post the global financial crisis, you clearly would have hit some bumps in the road but, actually, the markets have been heading pretty much in one direction for most of that time.”
It’s a message I have heard before, but it’s still powerful, and I would hope it’s still inspiring to younger professionals who might worry that the looming downturn spells disaster for their career prospects.
Several of Beardmore-Gray’s industry peers offered similar advice during the pandemic. “Starting at a low point in the market, when things don’t come as easily as they might during a rapidly growing marketplace, allows you to build skills and a foundation that sets you up for future success,” JLL’s EMEA markets boss, Andy Poppink, told me last summer.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel. It doesn’t feel like it when you’re in it. It didn’t feel like it in the depths of the dotcom crash. It didn’t feel like it in 2009 in the global financial crisis. But we are resilient people. So sticking with it, and being resilient and patient, will pay off.”
PGIM Real Estate chief executive Eric Adler, also speaking during the time of Covid lockdowns, agreed that crisis creates opportunity. “This will be a real accelerator for your career experience,” he told me when I asked what advice he had for younger team members. “When I think of the lessons that marked me most, that I carry with me to this day, they weren’t in buying a building and watching the cap rate compress or rents go up. They were always when something went wrong.”
I suppose what I’m trying to say, largely through gratuitously republishing the words of people smarter than me, is that despite all the doom and gloom out there, there are still huge opportunities to make a difference through a career in real estate. And in fact, carving out the early part of that career during a downturn might just be the making of you, provided you can hack the pace.
Or as the great Billy Ocean put it, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Now that’s a CD I haven’t added to the collection yet – be right back.
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews
