Getting Into Real Estate as a J.O.B

[Nick D'Alessandro]

Biggerpockets Team,

I have been in the education portion of my real estate journey and will continue to be on this educational push until August rolls around. I will be moving to the North Dallas area to be closer to family come August. 

My experience is in human resources but my passion is real estate. I have been aggressivly paying off my student debt and should be debt free come August. Unfortunately, that doesnt leave me with a lot of buffer to invest in real estate or start out as a real estate agent (my preferred job) 

I realize that there is more then one way to get into real estate and I wanted to get everyones opinions on what jobs they think I might be able to do related to real estate. 

I was thinking of being an apartment manager or a property manager but I am not sure if I can get into it having so little/no experience. 

Any recommendations? 

My end goal is to be a long-term buy and hold investor with a job in real estate in some way form or fashion (preferrably an agent). 

[MarZia RiVera]

Hello @Nick D'Alessandro

I would suggest scale down on your student loans payoff at the moment, maintain minimal or just above payments while taking the rest of those funds and more, whatever you can save for your "Real Estate business" fund.

You see it takes time to build a real estate business for property management, sales and listing.  And with that time building your business you will need cash to survive.  

To prepare, as suggested prior, start with getting your Real Estate license, at the same time find a Broker that offers full service property management, already has a portfolio of properties managed in brokerage (most important) along with great in house education in all aspects of RE. Not all Brokers / Brokerage are into PM. 

Now over the next 6 months until you relocate learn about PM and RE in general but most important to start is PM. Work with that Broker remote learning how to find owners to manage their properties. Start building a portfolio now over the next six months so when you move you are walking into full time RE earning monthly residual income from rents of those owners you have already on boarded.  You can do this by working out a split with the Broker while you are working remotely to bring in owners properties and learning the business now to August then a different split when you arrive and take over the day to day management. By August you will have created business providing residual monthly income to cover your cost of living giving you the opportunity to jump into sales full time with the pressure of making a sale to survive. 

Once you are here you can go back to aggressively paying off your student loans with your residual income from your PM portfolio.