Latest / The Comeback Career Podcast with Fexingo: Returning After a Gap, Stay-at-Home Re-Entry / How a Career Gap Helped One Parent Return as a Commercial Real Estate Analyst
Transcript
- Lucas: So Diane spent eight years at home with her kids, and then she came back as a commercial real estate analyst. Not an obvious pivot, but it worked, and I want to walk through exactly how she did it. Luna: Eight years is a long gap. I love that she didn't try to go back into public accounting — she reinvented herself. Lucas: Right. She had a degree in accounting and three years at a regional CPA firm before she stepped away. But when she started looking again, she didn't want the busy season grind. She wanted something analytical but with more flexibility. Luna: And she found that in CRE? Lucas: Yeah. She stumbled onto a blog post about commercial real estate analyst roles and realized the day-to-day — underwriting deals, building financial models in Excel, running Argus — it all played to her strengths. She just needed to prove she could still do it. Luna: Which is the same hurdle every parent with a gap faces. How do you convince someone you still have the skills? Lucas: Exactly. And Diane did two smart things. First, she took a six-week online course on Argus — that's the property-level valuation software, standard in CRE — for about four hundred dollars. Second, she found a local commercial real estate networking group and started attending their monthly breakfast meetings. Luna: The course is concrete, but the networking — that's harder for a lot of people. How did she manage that with kids at home? Lucas: She told me she treated it like a non-negotiable. Her husband took over breakfast duty one Thursday a month. She'd show up at 7:30 a.m., drink coffee, and just listen. For the first three meetings she barely spoke. Then one month someone mentioned they were drowning in rent roll data entry for a portfolio of strip malls. Luna: And that was her in. Lucas: That was her in. She raised her hand and said, 'I can do that. I'm fast in Excel, I can start next week.' It was a freelance gig at first, twenty hours a week, no benefits. But it gave her a current project to put on her resume. Luna: Smart. So she built a bridge before she went for the full-time role. Lucas: She did. And you know, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these shows going — if you've ever gotten something useful out of a Fexingo podcast, we'd love it if you threw in a coffee's worth at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's listener support that lets us keep making episodes exactly like this one, no ads, no sponsors. Luna: Yeah, it's wild that a small monthly donation from just a few listeners can cover our hosting and editing costs. So if you're in a position to help, we really appreciate it. Lucas: Alright, back to Diane. After three months of that freelance work, she had a concrete deliverable — a cleaned-up rent roll for seventeen properties — and a reference from the broker who hired her. Luna: So now she's ready to apply for a real job. What does her resume look like? Lucas: She listed her accounting experience first, then added a line for the gap that just said 'Career break — full-time parenting.' Under that, she put the freelance project and the Argus certification. She didn't try to hide the gap. She treated it as a neutral fact. Luna: I think a lot of people over-explain the gap on the resume. She kept it to one line. Lucas: One line. And in her cover letter, she addressed it directly — said she had maintained her analytical skills through online coursework and freelance work, and was eager to apply them. That got her a phone screen with a mid-size firm that manages about two hundred million dollars in commercial properties. Luna: Two hundred million — that's not a tiny shop. What was the interview like? Lucas: She said the technical part was surprisingly straightforward. They asked her to walk through a simple net operating income calculation and explain what a cap rate is. She'd practiced with the Argus training, so she felt confident. The harder part was the behavioral questions. Luna: Like what? Lucas: One was, 'Describe a time you had to manage multiple deadlines.' She talked about coordinating her kids' schedules — doctor appointments, school pickups, a part-time tutoring gig she did for a neighbor. She framed it as project management. The interviewer actually laughed and said, 'That sounds harder than my job.' Lucas: Exactly. She got the offer — junior analyst, seventy-two thousand dollars a year, three days in the office, two from home. Luna: Did she negotiate? Lucas: She did. And this is the part I want to highlight for anyone listening. She felt awkward — she hadn't negotiated a salary in over a decade. But she had data. She looked up the market rate for junior CRE analysts in her city on a site called CompAnalyst — not the free version, she paid fifty bucks for a report. Luna: Worth every penny. Lucas: The market range was sixty-eight to eighty thousand. Her offer was at the lower end. So she wrote a short email — one paragraph — saying she was excited to join, cited the data, and asked for seventy-five. They came back at seventy-four with a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus. Luna: That's a huge win. And she wouldn't have gotten it without research. Lucas: Right. And here's one more detail that stuck with me. When she started the job, her manager told her later that the gap actually worked in her favor. He said, 'I knew you'd be hungry and grateful, and you were. Plus, you had more real-world problem-solving than a fresh grad.' Luna: That's the thing — employers sometimes undervalue the gap, but the right one sees it as a signal of resilience. Lucas: Yeah. Diane has been in the role for fourteen months now. She just finished underwriting her first solo deal — a thirty-unit apartment building in a secondary market. She told me she still feels like she's catching up sometimes, but she's on the track she wanted. Luna: So for someone listening who has an accounting or finance background, what's the one takeaway? Lucas: I think it's this: don't try to go back to exactly what you did before. Use your skills as a foundation, but look for roles where the learning curve is steep but achievable. Diane picked a niche — commercial real estate — where the technical tools are learnable, and she invested a small amount of money and time to prove she could use them. Luna: Plus she built a social bridge through that networking group. That's the part a lot of people skip. Lucas: Absolutely. You can't just take a course and expect offers to roll in. You have to meet people in the industry, even if it feels awkward at first. Diane's first three breakfasts were silent, and that's fine. The fourth one changed her career. Luna: Alright, that's a good note to end on. Thanks for listening to The Comeback Career Podcast. We'll be back next week with another story of reentry.