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Most commercial real estate investors, developers and brokers want to make their organizations more efficient, but it can be expensive to buy new software or hire a tech consultant for custom development. Many think they have no choice, but the reality is that plenty of the inefficiencies in your day-to-day business can be addressed very easily by a junior programmer.
For example, do you have many deals in different Excel templates and no easy way to compare them? Are you updating rent surveys in Excel and having difficulty keeping good historical records? Do you have to go to 20 different places to manually copy data and paste it all into a single template for offering memos? For most small and midsize businesses, a software engineering intern can solve these problems with a few simple scripts and database queries. However, it’s tough for most real estate professionals to understand what to look for when hiring for a role like this.
I’ve hired some extremely talented programmers to work with both real estate companies and tech startups. Here are some of the strategies I’ve used to get good results for my CRE business.
1. Make Friends With Professors
If you are friends with a knowledgeable professor at a good local university, it can be a gold mine for identifying talented engineers. My first two hires for my current business were referred to me by data science professors. Real estate professionals are naturally good at networking, so I networked with data science professors, asked them if they knew any talented students who might be interested in gaining some domain expertise in real estate market analysis and quickly found the team I needed to build my business.
Because your real estate company is not going to be able to train very junior engineers to code efficiently, you’re probably going to want to look for students with some experience who are pursuing master’s degrees, rather than undergraduate students. Look for someone who wants to gain some industry-specific knowledge and work for a summer or two. You can gain a ton of efficiencies in a pretty short time if you find a knowledgeable developer to work with, and it will pay dividends in their career to have domain knowledge in CRE tech.
2. Give A Simple Coding Test
Everyone looks great on paper, but you can see true talent in the results they produce. For every software engineer and data scientist I’ve hired, whether full-time or intern, I developed a simple two- to three-hour coding test to see how capable they were of solving problems relevant to our business. The best part of this approach is that you don’t need to be an engineer to know if they solved the problem or not — just look at what they generated. If you ask them to merge a bunch of Excel files from multiple folders together with a script, and they do that, then they have accomplished the task.
For example, in one test I gave developers an Excel file with a list of properties and some of their attributes, including things like year built, number of units and average rent. I asked them to put the data on a web-based map where I could toggle different attributes and filter pins on the map. For a skilled developer, this should only take a couple of hours, and I’ve used tests like these to differentiate developers who know which buzzwords to say in an interview from those who can actually produce great results.
3. Move Quickly
The market for skilled developers is very competitive, and at any given time, a developer is likely being inundated with emails from recruiters. If you hire quickly, you can get great people on board before they go on dozens of interviews.
In our hiring process, I review code samples and resumes, conduct phone interviews and send coding tests right after the phone interviews. Then, provided they do well on the test, I invite them to in-person interviews where we discuss the results of the test and introduce them to the team. If it’s a good fit, we usually make an offer on the spot. The entire process only takes about a week. Developers appreciate the decisiveness and the opportunity to dive in and start working right away if they like the company and the team. This simplified hiring process has really helped us attract talented developers, and at times we’ve beat much larger competitors because of it.
4. Get Referrals From Current And Former Team Members
It may seem like common sense, but if you’re fortunate enough to have hired a talented engineer, they will likely be the most qualified to identify other talented engineers. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say, and some of our best hires have been recommended by other people on the team.
If you’re hiring someone for an internship, it can be tough when they move on. Definitely ask them to recommend others who may be interested in gaining the same experience. Also invest in getting your team out to meetups and trade events where programmers congregate. Give your team opportunities to meet other talented engineers, and they will gladly identify your future team members.
At the end of the day, if you’re looking to solve some technology-related issues in your real estate business, it’s likely much simpler and more cost effective to hire a junior/intern software engineer than to work with a consultant. It may sound difficult to hire for a tech role, but if you follow these simple strategies, you can pretty easily find a great fit for your team.