From College to a Job Amidst the COVID-19 Recession
Many A.CRE readers are young professionals and college students trying to navigate the job market in a recession. Finding a job in commercial real estate amidst the craziness of the COVID-19 pandemic can be challenging, especially for those with little to no experience in the industry. In this episode, we speak with Matthew Farrell, someone with direct experience finding his first job in CRE in the middle of a deep recession.
In 2010, Matt completed his undergraduate studies amidst the worst recession in a century. At the time, he was 25, married, and had a one-year-old son. Despite his best efforts and stellar education, he graduated with student loans, a family to support, and no job prospects.
Through a combination of smarts, patience, humility, and pure will, he was able to piece together a series of opportunities that set him up for where he is today. Recognizing the challenges many are facing today and wanting to offer encouragement to those struggling to find work, Matt shared his story via LinkedIn last week. In concluding his story he wrote:
“I know it sucks right now. I know you are scared. I know that you feel helpless.
I also know that it won’t last. Your dreams are not cancelled, they are just going to take a little longer.
Hang in there.
I promise it will get better!”
In this episode, Matt retells his story. Spencer, Michael, Matt, and Sam then discuss actionable steps young real estate professionals and students can take to gain experience and land a job in the middle of the COVID-19 recession.
A huge thank you to Matt Farrell for his guest appearance on this episode. Matthew Farrell has nearly 10 years of commercial real estate experience, including stints at CBRE, Walmart Real Estate, and Greystar. Currently, he is based in Seattle Washington where he works as a Development Associate for Tarragon, a leading real estate development firm. Matt holds an undergraduate degree in management from Brigham Young University and a dual MBA and Masters Degree in Real Estate from Cornell University. To contact Matt directly, click here.
From College to a Job Amidst the COVID-19 Recession
Watch as Spencer, Michael, Sam, and Matt discuss Matt’s story as well as the general challenges young professionals and students face in today’s commercial real estate job market.
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Resources from this Episode
- Adventures in CRE: https://www.adventuresincre.com/
- A.CRE Accelerator: https://www.adventuresincre.com/accelerator
- More CRE Career Advice: https://www.adventuresincre.com/careers/
Episode Transcript – From College to a Job Amidst the COVID-19 Recession
Sam Carlson (00:00):
Hello and welcome back to the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. Today we’re joined by guest, Matt Farrell, and we’re talking about going from college to a job, amidst the COVID recession. Let’s get started.
Announcer (00:12):
Welcome to the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. Join Michael Belasco and Spencer Burton as they pull back the curtain on everything commercial real estate, and introduce you to some of the top minds in the industry. If you want to take your skills to the next level and be part of a growing community of CRE professionals across the world, this is for you.
Sam Carlson (00:38):
All right. Hey, welcome back to the audio series. Today’s a really special day and it’s a special day for a lot of reasons. One, obviously we’ve got Matt Farrell on the podcast. Thank you Matt for coming, appreciate you.
Matt Farrell (00:49):
Thanks for having me.
Sam Carlson (00:49):
And not only that, we’re going to be addressing a lot of the, what’s going on in the current job environment as well as for people coming out of college. What are your options? What should you do? What can you do? So to kind of get us started, I’m going to shoot us over to Spencer for the introduction and we’ll go from there.
Spencer Burton (01:07):
Yeah. So Matt, really great to have you. This is a topic that we’re getting a lot of inquiries about on Adventures in CRE. It seems like a lot of my conversations with ACRErs right now are directly related to this. And so you had posted your experience on LinkedIn recently and it rang true and you’re a friend and we know each other from grad school. And so I thought we’d bring you on and talk about this topic which is so important to a lot of people right now.
Spencer Burton (01:41):
Now for introduction, Matthew Farrell has nearly 10 years of commercial real estate experience. Those include stints at CBRE, Walmart Real Estate and Greystar. And currently, he’s based in Seattle, Washington, where he works as a Development Associate Tarragon, which is a leading real estate development firm there. Matt holds an undergraduate degree in management from Brigham Young University and a dual MBA and master’s degree in real estate from Cornell University. Matt, thanks for being on here.
Matt Farrell (02:14):
Thanks Spencer, I appreciate it.
Spencer Burton (02:15):
Yeah. So set up for us, if you wouldn’t mind, why you shared that post on LinkedIn. And maybe there are listeners who haven’t read the post, probably quite a few, maybe talk about why you posted that and what exactly you posted.
Matt Farrell (02:36):
Yeah, sure. So I started seeing the last couple weeks, a lot of social media posts and things and news articles about virtual graduations. And I realized that there’s a lot of people finishing school in this month and next month. And it reminded me of 2010, when I graduated from BYU. We were in the middle of a recession and I was trying to get a job in the real estate industry. And I had a really rough time of it and for a few months there, it was pretty, pretty hard. And I just kind of wanted to share some encouraging words with people. So I got on LinkedIn, kind of just intro to my experience and kind of told people what I’ve been through. And just kind of told them hang in there, it’s going to be hard for a while but you’ll get through it. And I was really surprised by the response. A lot of people seem to resonate with the message and I’m glad that it was able to hopefully get to some of the people who need to read it.
Spencer Burton (03:52):
Yeah. So let me share just the end of that post. You say, “My family of three,” So I guess you had a family of three at the time, “Has grown to a family of six. We have a roof over our heads and food on our table and I have a job that I love working with some amazing people. I know it sucks right now. I know you’re scared. I know that you feel helpless. I also know it won’t last. Your dreams are not canceled. They are just going to take a little longer.” A few weeks back, we had an episode here where Sam and I and Michael share our experience going through the great recession. And it was likewise difficult and our career trajectory was perhaps flattened some. And so I empathize with what you went through in a different way. And so thank you for sharing that, I guess is the first thing. But let me ask you this question to kick this off. You, Matt Farrell 2020, put yourself back in the shoes of Matt Farrell 2010. And what would you do differently, if anything?
Matt Farrell (05:06):
Well, for starters, I really would have loved to be able to tell myself, “Don’t blame yourself for what’s happening right now.” I know a lot of that happened back then. I was really kind of kicking myself because I had a family to support and we had to move in with some in-laws. And Spencer, I listened to your recession podcast and you mentioned some of the humiliation you felt. Definitely present during those months. It would have been great to know that it wasn’t entirely my fault. There are bigger factors in play right now, beyond an individual. And just being able to remove that sense of blame and guilt from myself and shift part of it on to the economy or circumstances outside of my control, that would have been a huge help for me just from the get go. And then second, I would’ve, like you said, just realize that my plans, they’re not going to work out exactly the way I had envisioned them. But they can still work out. I kind of think of it like you’re crossing a river and there’s stepping stones. We’re just adding an extra stone or two before we get to the place where we want to be. And just kind of taking a better perspective on it, I think would have been a huge help for me.
Sam Carlson (06:47):
Yeah.
Spencer Burton (06:48):
Yeah. I’m glad you said that. When I was going through 2008, I was feeling a sense of, as you described, an additional stepping stone. It’s like I knew where I was going and all of a sudden that was stalled, and I had to completely change directions. And I remember having a conversation with my grandfather. He didn’t fully understand what I was going through at the time, but he knew that I was struggling like many of us were. And his advice was, “Spencer, you may feel like you’re old.” And at the time, right, I was late twenties. He’s like, “You may feel like you’re old, but you’re still young. And if it takes you a few more years longer to get where you want to go, that’s okay.” And that’s when I really put things in perspective. In the moment it’s like, “My whole life is crashing down,” from a career standpoint. And I think for you, right, when you have family around you, it really actually puts things in perspective and it really doesn’t matter. But from our career perspective, it felt like everything was stalled and therefore collapsing. And that just isn’t the case. Sam, Michael, thoughts on that?
Sam Carlson (08:01):
Go ahead Michael.
Michael Belasco (08:02):
Okay. I was just going to ask you guys, and I’ve experienced this personally, but not as a result of circumstances. To a degree circumstances are out of my control. Did you feel like the inability to execute on your desired plan at that time helped you level set or gave you the space to think and reevaluate? And if so, do you feel like you may have been better positioned as a result of being stuck at that time? Did that question make sense?
Sam Carlson (08:31):
Yeah, I think it dovetails nicely into what Matt started out with. When you’re in the thick of it and when you can’t see the forest through the trees, you do tend to default to this, almost like a self-loathing, like, “Oh, man.” And it does seem like your position is way worse than everybody else’s. Okay. And so that’s that failure. Failure is not fun, it’s not fun. And when you’re young and failing, it’s really not fun because you don’t have the perspective. Now failure when you look back is like the best investment money could buy. You can’t get better education and you can’t get better money in the bank than actual failure, so long as that fail failure leads to activity, to behavior, to changes, to success. And I say success. If you’ve ever seen those gifs of what the success journey looks like, it’s all like squiggly lines and everything. I think life is a lot like that.
Sam Carlson (09:45):
And when I think about what it was like for me back in 2008, ’09, ’10, ’11, that timeframe, as well as what I see kind of happening around us now, it’s easy to say, “Oh man, everything is wrong.” And that is your permanent, it’s like your life sentence. Like everything is going to change and it’s going to be for the worst. But it’s like any type of what is, there’s that song that it’s like, strong enough to bend, I think is the phrase. Right? And they found the trees that are strong enough to actually bend with the wind come back and their root system is stronger. And I feel like that exact metaphor applies to my life, like I got blown over. Matt obviously got blown over. We all got blown over. But because we were strong enough to bend when, when we came back and the wind subsided and we pushed ourselves back, man, that root system in everything you do is so much stronger in the future.
Sam Carlson (10:54):
And that’s why I think we had mentioned in that previous episode that we feel, I’m not going to say bulletproof, but we feel basically bulletproof from what’s happening now because instead of being in that, “Hey, all I see is the forest,” you get into the hard times and now you go into it just seeing the entire, all the trees.
Spencer Burton (11:16):
Yeah.
Sam Carlson (11:16):
And I think it’s empowering. While it’s not fun, I think it’s empowering because you get to skip all those steps of, Hey, I mean there’s no self loathing here. I’m just going to advance to step nine of what I did. Right? And hopefully that’s what we’re going to share and that’s what we’re trying to share through this today.
Spencer Burton (11:35):
Yeah, yeah. And I want to get back to Matt’s story. But I think to your point, Sam, you’re on these railroad tracks and you’re barreling ahead and because things are good, you don’t see any reason to change direction.
Sam Carlson (11:51):
Yeah.
Spencer Burton (11:51):
And so whether you’re in school and you know exactly where you’re going and you’re barreling ahead and all of a sudden the tracks are gone. And you feel directionless and you don’t know what’s going on. But back to Michael’s question, what it does is it forces you to do introspection around who you are and what you enjoy. And yeah, it sucks, but there’s a reset in your thought process. And because of that, the end result can be so much better if you take and you do the proper introspection. And I said this on the last episode, I would not change a thing.
Sam Carlson (12:36):
Yeah, I wouldn’t either.
Spencer Burton (12:36):
Because I’m in a so much better position today because of that. Now Matt, call back to your senior year, maybe even your junior year, right? Because you graduated 2010, that would’ve put you kind of 2008, 2009, when you’re getting close to graduation. Did you want to go into real estate? Was that the direction that you wanted to go? Or are you in real estate today because of something else? Talk us through what you wanted to do prior to graduation and what ended up happening.
Matt Farrell (13:08):
Yeah, I mean I definitely wanted to get into real estate. That was my goal probably as early back as my junior year. Initially I wanted to be an architect and that quickly changed when I talked to a couple architects. But then my goal was commercial real estate all the way. And in 2008, 2009 and early 2010, when I was still in school, I was looking at the commercial real estate world just collapsing around me. And I was doing everything right and I was having all the informational interviews with people. And every single one of them said, “Look in a different industry. Now is not the time to be going into commercial real estate.” And I pushed back against that because I knew what I wanted, but I did start to look elsewhere. I interviewed with some tech companies, some other companies, trying to see if maybe it’s not too late I can pivot. Those didn’t work out, which now I’m very grateful for because I’m in the industry I wanted to be in. I’m doing the job that I wanted to do and I couldn’t be happier with it.
Spencer Burton (14:28):
Yeah. So is it better, whether you’re a grad student looking at that first full time job out of grad school or likewise undergrad looking at that first full time job out of undergrad. Is it better to take the first job you can get so that you’re employed, which is nice or is it better to hold off for the ideal job?
Matt Farrell (14:51):
No, I think for me I was lucky that I had family that I could lean on during those difficult times so that I could take the time to find the job in the industry that I wanted to be in. Not everyone’s that lucky and some people do, I think, need to take the first job that comes along because they have to put a roof over their heads. They have to feed their family. I think it totally depends on an individual’s situation. But if you do take the first job that comes along, I would say try to make it a job that you can pivot into what you want to do eventually.
Sam Carlson (15:30):
Yeah.
Matt Farrell (15:32):
If you get into something and then try to make 180 degree turn.
Sam Carlson (15:37):
You have a part of your post and part of your story that I think is extremely valuable, insightful. And I don’t know if you fell into it or what the course of events were that led you into the volunteering idea. Right? But that was the inception of where you’re at today, correct?
Matt Farrell (15:57):
Yeah, definitely.
Sam Carlson (15:58):
So talk to us about that, how that came to be, what was the idea there? Did you just say, “Maybe I’ll just go try working for free effectively? Right? Talk us through that whole story and that thought process and how that ultimately panned out for you.
Matt Farrell (16:15):
Yeah. So it goes back to kind of what Mike was asking about earlier, the pause. So during this time period after I graduated, before I started working at this other company, it was probably close to four months when I was full-time looking for a job. And I took that time to do a lot of one-on-ones with people who worked in the real estate industry and trying to find out, where in this world do I want to fit? And what are the companies that I’d be interested in? And the company that I ended up going to work for was one that I had talked to looking for a full-time job and they had told me that, “There are no opportunities available, sorry.” Two or three months down the road I went back to them and I said, “I’ve been talking to all these different people and they tell me that the number one thing I need right now is experience. Could I come, 20 hours a week, you don’t have to pay me a dime, just get some experience with you guys. And I’ll still be looking for a full-time job. I know you guys don’t have anything right now, but just help me get that experience. You’ll get some free labor. It’s a win-win for both of us.” And they were open to the idea and it put me on the path that I’m on today.
Sam Carlson (17:43):
And you know what’s interesting about that too? Well, there’s two things. One is if you start thinking about where that company, where whatever company that was, where that company was during that exact timeframe, they probably would have loved to have been hiring people, but they couldn’t. Right? And so you gave them the opportunity to do something they wanted to do, solve a problem, provide value. And you did that with just basically saying, “Hey, I’m going to do this for you and I get something out of it, but you’re going to get a lot more out of this, free labor, you’re going to get a lot more out of this than I’m going to.” Right?
Sam Carlson (18:26):
And then the second thing is, just in my career, I really do not like the idea of goals. Okay? I like goals. I have goals, but I don’t like the way people think about goals. Like, “Hey, that’s the goal.” And nobody ever reaches their goals, so it ends up being a very negative process. But what I do like is identifying the behaviors. I’ll set a goal or I’ll be like, “Okay, what are the behaviors?” And then focus on the behaviors. And in that situation, the reason I’m mentioning that is because obviously you had a goal to get a job, your ideal job in commercial real estate. And it may be was with that company, maybe it wasn’t.
Sam Carlson (19:06):
But at some point, you just got to start doing something, taking action. And what are the actions that you can identify that you can actually do? And you can actually ask somebody if you can work for free. That’s something that you can do. And then I think what ends up happening is if you focus on those behaviors, it materializes on the backend in different ways, which kind of gets you to your goal. So I mean were you just thinking, “I can’t sit around anymore,” and it doesn’t sound like you were sitting around. You were at least engaging with conversations. But where you just innovating ideas of saying, “What can I do? I’m talking with people. I’m asking if there’s jobs. None of that is available or working. What can I do?” And is that kind of what led to the whole idea of, “Hey, I’ll work for free?”
Matt Farrell (19:54):
Yeah. I mean a lot of it was just I’m new to this industry. I knew I wanted to be a real estate developer. And a lot of the people that I talked to said, “You got to get some experience. You got to dip your toes in the water.” And so this first job that I got into was doing construction management actually, which I was not trained at all in. There’s no way they would have hired me, just if I had applied for an open position. But because of the way we approached it, they were open to the idea of me just kind of learning on the job. And I got in there, I got my work boots on, I put my hard hat on and I learned how a building gets put together. And that’s something that I could not learn in a classroom. And that knowledge is still valuable to me today. So it was kind of a, what are the skills I need to acquire to get where I want to be? And since I can’t be where I want to be right now, what can I do right now to acquire those skills?
Sam Carlson (21:05):
Yeah.
Spencer Burton (21:06):
Yeah. What I love about it is the proactive approach that you took to it. In these environments where there’s less opportunity than usual, it requires a proactive approach that maybe we’re not as used to doing. And so you sat down and thought, “Okay, what do I need here and what can I do to get it?” And you went out and you did it. And we had these conversations with kind of young ACRE readers and, “How do I get a job and who should I talk to?” And sometimes it’s sit down and think about how you can be different. And so maybe that means spending the next three weeks and build a really cool real estate financial model. In the spirit of Adventures in CRE, which what should we do? Why not? And then every time you talk to an employer, share that with them.
Sam Carlson (21:59):
Yeah.
Spencer Burton (22:00):
That’s something different than others have done? Maybe it’s, to Matt’s idea, where you offer to help. You say, “Hey, look, I understand you’re not hiring. Now is a difficult time to hire. I just really want to learn and I love what you guys are doing and I know you can’t pay me. That’s okay. And here’s 20 hours of my time. Let me contribute in some way.” What a great proactive approach rather than sitting on your hands in your in-laws basement doing nothing other than submitting resumes or informational calls.
Michael Belasco (22:33):
We tells this in a lot of my phone calls and even when we speak to to classes and stuff like that. It kind of translates. It’s the experience gap and the inability to do that, it’s get creative and think of ways to contribute both to building your own resume. And we would even say, if you haven’t graduated yet, there’s ways to get independent credits that helps you build. Maybe you want to write an article or publish something on a topic, get some in depth expertise. Maybe you interview people to create some sort of content, right? So maybe you want to learn about, I don’t know, tax incremental financing. You contact a developer to gauge that. So there’s all these types of things. I mean me and a colleague of ours, Steven Porter, went out and found this defunct grocery store and there was a nonprofit that wanted to potentially redevelop or potentially buy it.
Michael Belasco (23:26):
And so we found this one off idea where we came on for free. I had an internship over the winter for free when I was at school and it wasn’t during these times. But I like, you Matt, was for me, I was a career switcher and desperate for any type of experience to put on your resume. There’s a lot of creative ways to do things and then articulate how you’re dealing that so that whether you’re putting it on a resume or talking to people, you could tell that story. So I really love, first of all, the message and all the times. Yeah, my question back to allowing for that space, yet, it’s a negative time, it feels bad. But it also is a way to reset. And I had more internal experiences that led me to reset. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d end up in commercial state personally.
Michael Belasco (24:17):
But it was a passion that sort of developed over time, through down times, through bad times, which is another story altogether. But it resonates really with your story. I just want to say that, like the volunteering for free, I don’t advocate that in a good market. There’s sort of a a fine line. But today, when companies are struggling and you need that experience, that is a wonderful concept, today. Where if we were in a great market, I might argue different that you don’t want to be working for free. There’s sort of a demeaning aspect to that in the fact that your time is worth something in you’re a professional. But I mean, I did it in an up market personally for a short period of time, which helped tremendously.
Michael Belasco (24:59):
But now is a great time to get out there and see how you can help a company who may be struggling and get that experience. So I just wanted to resonate with that.
Sam Carlson (25:07):
Yeah.
Spencer Burton (25:09):
So let’s get practical now. And I’ll open this question for the group, but more specifically to Matt. So what if I can’t find a real estate internship this summer? I think we’ve talked about the full-time job enough, so let’s stick with the internship. What if I can’t find a real estate internship this summer? What should I do?
Matt Farrell (25:34):
Yeah, I mean that’s tough. People need that experience and sometimes it just doesn’t materialize. I think it’s important to reach out to as many people as you can and establish those relationships and take the time to learn. If you’re not working full-time in an internship, you can still use your time wisely to position yourself well and to help advance your career. And those relationships that you establish now, will pay off later on in your life. They’re not a waste of time. They’re not a way to fill time until you get something real. They are real and they will benefit you later on in your life. So there’s definitely value to investing in those relationships.
Sam Carlson (26:32):
Yeah. And I’ll kind of add onto this with something pretty cool that we’ve seen in ACRE, is the whole idea of an internship and these experiences is to give you more experience and more knowledge. Right? So if you don’t have it directly, what can you do indirectly, meaning on your own independently, to get those. And when COVID hit and people were forced to stay home, it was really interesting because the folks who are, I mean we consider them our family, our tribe at ACRE, the readers, the loyal people that come. And they read the content, they engage with the content, they ask questions, they listen to this audio series as well as the podcast. Those folks, they came and you should have seen, the amount of people that started engaging with content, reading it, asking questions, joining the Accelerator, graduating from the Accelerator, meaning people that had already purchased the Accelerator. They’re like, “Well, I’m going to get better at modeling. I’m going to take this course. I’m going to, if I’ve already purchased it, I’m going to go through it more deliberately or maybe again.”
Sam Carlson (27:45):
And in fact, we had a testimonial from another person on LinkedIn, Cole. And Cole, I would kind of butcher your last name. I think it’s Bonenberger. I’m sorry my friend. But he put a really interesting testimonial/comment on his LinkedIn profile. And he talked about, “Hey, I’m at home but I’m doing this 16 course Accelerator.” He went through it and then all these people came out and they said, “Nice job, way to go.” If you can improve your education, your skills, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter what it is. If you can improve and then show something for it. I was just blown away by how many people took and I think that’s a testament to the people that are the readers at ACRE, what kind of people they are because they came in droves and they really engaged with the content and they let us know it. And so I think if, again, it’s this whole conversation has been revolving around being proactive. What can you do? Taking control. And I think just, even if it’s independent, furthering your education is a huge, huge part of that journey.
Spencer Burton (29:05):
Yeah, I think that’s true. So engagement increases and there’s a million things that someone could do. So for instance, Matt posted a very personal but impactful. I don’t know how long it took you, Matt, to put that together. And you’re not looking for a job right now. But what you wrote impacted enough people that it created a little bit of a buzz. And whether that was your intention or not will help your career down the road. Right? So that’s an example that’s outside of maybe the experience of students in colleges right now. But if I were in college right now and I was concerned about getting maybe an internship or a job, I would spend the weekend, I would research something to Michael’s point, that I’m really interested in.
Spencer Burton (29:53):
I’m kind of a nerdy modeling guy, so I’d probably build a model, but someone else might do market research. Someone else might create some crazy idea around opco/propco strategies for gas stations, or whatever it may be. And then I would post it on LinkedIn and I’d say, “Hey, I might feel vulnerable here. Feel free to tear this apart. But this is what I did over the weekend and it’s because it’s something I’m passionate about.” Or by the way, if you wanted to post that on Adventures in CRE, all you have to do is email Mike and say, “Hey, I have this crazy thing, would you guys publish it?” And we probably would. Right? My point is there’s a lot of things that students can do. Even if you can’t get an internship, learn something and then share it with others and that will benefit your career in the short term and in the longterm.
Matt Farrell (30:45):
Yeah, and to add onto that. So with this post, it was not my intention at all to create any kind of buzz or anything. I just had some thoughts that I wanted to get out there. But since I posted it, I think it was four or five days ago, I’ve had probably 20 new connection requests on LinkedIn. Just people reaching out, they saw my posts, they want to connect. And I don’t know if any of those connections will lead to anything, but that’s an opportunity that arose based off of just a little bit of work that I did putting together my thoughts on LinkedIn posts. So I totally agree with that Spencer.
Michael Belasco (31:23):
Yeah. And in the spirit of that, another idea is you could research something that interests you and put it out there. But in the spirit of what Matt did, the question is, how can I help? Right? What can I do that will A, push my interests along further but also help the next person out? And I think that’s where, when you have that mind frame, and Spencer, you’re good at reminding me of this a lot. So it’s like, you put that out there, it comes back to you tenfold. It’s this, what can I do to help you? And in turn, there’s just that feeling that comes back. Matt, you just said you had 20 new requests and people want to be involved with and support people that are always thinking about that. And again, if you’re inexperienced, like Matt went out and I went out as well and said, “I’ll do this for free for you to help you in exchange.” There’s a help there.
Michael Belasco (32:20):
Maybe you’re not even asking for that help directly, but you just think, how can I push myself along by helping others? And that’s to me, I love the reaching out. Reach out to the smaller companies who might be struggling worse. Maybe, this is an idea, like think of the asset classes that are struggling or maybe there’s something to do. Maybe there’s small hotel companies that are struggling and maybe there’s a volunteer opportunity there. But yeah, my mind frame is really push yourself along by helping others. So what can you do now that will be a win-win?
Sam Carlson (32:57):
Yeah. Well this has been a lot of fun, very enjoyable and enjoyable as far as conversation, but I think really practical and thoughtful advice. So Matt, thanks for being on. We appreciate you.
Matt Farrell (33:11):
Thanks for having me. Can I just end with one quick-
Sam Carlson (33:14):
Yeah.
Matt Farrell (33:15):
Quick conclusion to my story, my 2010 story?
Sam Carlson (33:19):
Yeah.
Matt Farrell (33:20):
So I mentioned it took me about four months to find something after graduating. Probably eight months after that, so a year after I graduated from my undergrad, one of the people that I had reached out to in that first month of unemployment came back to me with a full time job offer. He he knew I was out there struggling. He knew I was out there looking. He didn’t have anything at the time. But that job was incredible and it was perfect, and it set me up for a lot of future success. And I don’t think I would have gotten that job if I hadn’t gone through what I went through. So again, just to reiterate the point, your plans might have changed but they’re not canceled. They might just take a little bit longer. So just hang in there and don’t give up the hope.
Sam Carlson (34:19):
Awesome. Thank you so much. That’s a perfect way to conclude this episode. So you guys, we will see you on the next one. Thanks for tuning in.
Announcer (34:28):
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. For show notes and additional resources, head over to www.adventuresincre.com/audioseries. Would you like to learn real estate financial modeling in a matter of weeks and do it with zero guesswork? If so, the ACRE Accelerator is for you. The Accelerator is a step-by-step, case-based program designed to teach you exactly what you need to know and in the order you need to know it, so you can gain both the knowledge and experience to take your career to the next level. To see if the Accelerator is right for you, go to www.adventuresincre.com/accelerator.
