Investors with a RE license

[Jason Nesbitt]

For all of you investing with a RE license out there, how do you best leverage your RE license in investing? Are you doing both sales and investing, or focusing more on just one of these activities? How do they compliment or complicate each other?

My wife and I are new investors in San Jose who have a JV venture partner for fix and flips. Our partner is a contractor and experienced flipper. When we asked him to JV, he agreed but asked me to get my RE license. The arrangement is that we will find the property, invest 1/2 capital, and list and sell the property. He will invest the other 1/2 of the capital. Construction will be done at his costs, and we will throw my commissions into the pot.

The proceeds of fix and flips (and perhaps sales commissions?) will go into buying commercial property for long term buy and hold.

Now that I am close to being licensed, I am having visions of selling retail RE and having that capital supercharge our investment business. My day job as a nurse and my wife's as a physician pays the bills, so the commissions would go straight into an LLC for further investing.

My question is: will pursuing a part-time career be a distraction from our primary goal of being investors, or will it help us achieve our goals? Our ultimate goal of investing is to gain freedom of time. We both enjoy our jobs, but want more freedom to live our lives the way we want, especially to spend time with our kids. My fear is that pursuing a career as an agent will take up more valuable time and distract from the larger goal. The benefits that I can see are learning more about the industry and making some extra cash to invest.

What are your thoughts?