Advice for Starting RE Career out of College

[E. Jacobs]

Hi everybody!

New to the forums here- look very nice. Anyways, I'm 20 years and studying finance and real estate in college right now. I will graduate about a year from today, and I really want to get rolling with REI. I've been doing a lot of reading about real estate to help prepare myself for next year, which is how I came across this forum. After reading through a bunch of threads, I decided that this is a great source of knowledge that I definitely want to be a part of.

Basically, I was wondering how exactly to start my career in real estate, and is it plausible to start off doing it full time right out of school? I've read in various places that real estate requires no money to start off, and I was wondering how true this is based on experience. Would I be better off finding a fixed income job in real estate to gain knowledge and then using money from that for my investments? Ideally, I'd like to just be a long-term investor so that my assets will generate wealth for me, but I was not sure how I would be able to support myself until my portfolio grew large enough to make a decent living. I understand that flipping houses is a way to make some quick cash which I could then reinvest for rentals, but once again how exactly does this work in the early phases of investing with little capital to work with? Ultimately, I want my properties to work for me, not the other way around, so I don't want to solely be flipping for a living. But I will do whatever it takes to succeed in real estate. Can anyone offer some advice for someone coming out of school and looking to get started in real estate right away?

And if I'm covering topics already mentioned elsewhere in the forum, please forgive me. I did some reading around but didn't really find exactly what I was looking for, although if I missed answers to my questions feel free to just redirect me. Thanks a lot and I'm very excited to get started on here!