WCRER

At the end of my junior year WSU I decided to stay for summer school and found a job at the Washington Center for Real Estate Research. I have always been interested in learning more about real estate because my father has worked in the business for most of his entire life. I have always wanted to learn what he was doing at work all the time and thought that working for the center would be a great opportunity to expand on my resume and find out more about this intriguing industry. I had an interview with the director of the center Glenn Crellin, and I received the job less than a week later. I work closely with two of my good friends, Kevin Dainty and Ty Martin, which makes the work more fun when you have good co-workers. Going into this job I didn’t quite know what to expect, but after receiving the proper training I quickly picked up on the do’s and don’ts of the job and was acclimated into the job scene swiftly.

The state has hired Washington State to conduct apartment vacancy surveys, we call individual apartment complexes in assigned counties and find the vacancy numbers, the average size of apartments, the average rent for those places and to find the amenities for the complexes. The job consists of making numerous phone calls to hundreds of complexes, it can become monotonous at times but the data that we collect helps apartment owners with pricing and trends that the market is undergoing.

There are times when we are asked to pull up real estate data from multiple different real estate industries such as retail, industrial, office and commercial properties. We take the data we collect helps for forecasting trends that the specific counties and we can take the data obtained to give us a view of those specific industries and get a statewide picture of how the real estate market is doing in any specific time period. It is our job to find the trends in the numbers and correlate them to what is going on in the world and find out why the numbers are doing what they are doing.

This job has flexible hours so that I can have time to go to my classes, and whenever I have a break I can go into work and get a few more hours in making phone calls or gathering data for reports. I receive experience in related field that I am interested in, working a job with people I like to be around and I am getting more focused on the future. I love this job and will be working here until I graduate in May.