Ex-Morgan Stanley real money salesman joins real estate business

If you lose your jobs in fixed income sales now, you may not easily find a new one. US investment banks are still hiring in London, but they're not hiring very lavishly. Mitsubishi UFG wants to hire fixed income professionals, but no one knows how many. And, there are still plenty of unwanted fixed income people floating around from last year and the year before that and the year before that...

In the circumstances, Theo O'Donnell, the former head of Morgan Stanley's real money and managed futures desk in London, has decided to do something completely different. As of two months ago, he's been head of business development at Immobel.com, an online real estate technology firm.

Immobel is a US-based real estate website which aims to make real estate listings visible to a high end international audience. Present in the UK since 2009, it's never filed any accounts.

For O'Donnell, Immobel marks a dramatic change in direction. He joined Morgan Stanley straight out of university (Dublin, English Literature, first class honours) in 2007 and stayed there until there until February 2016, rising to become an executive director and head of the real money desk.

With London fixed income jobs hard to come by and the situation in danger of getting worse, O'Donnell may have done the right thing in choosing to do something different entirely. Whether now's the time to embark upon a career marketing UK real estate to overseas buyers is debatable though.