Career Insight

[Ian Lockwood]

BP Community, I'm hoping you guys can provide some insight into my situation. I'll start first with my long term goals. 

Long term: I would like to make full-time income from residential properties I own and rent. Start with small properties and over time acquire more and/or trade up for larger multi-unit properties. I currently have zero properties - brand new to this. Please don't ask me what "full-time income" means because that changes over a lifetime. I'm currently married with no kids, but that will change. I don't need to be stupid rich, but I would like to be financially comfortable with the freedom to live my life on my terms. Nothing crazy. 

With that being said, for the past 8 years I have been training college athletes, helping them to become faster, stronger, etc. The hours were awful and the pay was awful. Most jobs hover around $30-45k per year while working 60-70 hours a week. I enjoyed aspects of it but there was zero life/work balance. 

With my long term goals in mind, I believe becoming a real estate agent is the best approach to learning the ropes of the real estate world. However I do not have an interest in being a real estate agent for decades. I simply see it as a way to gain knowledge and lessen the learning curve for real estate investing. I'm hoping it could also help me make decent money (i.e., more then $30k) to help save for down payments on invest properties.

Leading a life with balance (not working all the time) is important to me though and my biggest fear is walking into a job with the same hours that I had before. I've been told that residential real estate has very bad hours (evenings, weekends, etc) and can be a grind to make a decent living. 

Conversely I've heard differing thoughts on commercial real estate. I've heard that it's a better life/work balance because the hours are more predictable and weekends aren't often required. However I've also read that commercial real estate is a huge grind and "only the strong survive / dog eats dog" type of stuff. All the info online about commercial real estate makes it seem far worse then residential, yet I've had the owner of a very successful private real estate brokerage tell me that commercial is a much better life then residential. 

With my long-term goals in mind, I would greatly appreciate any insight people could offer. I realize it's a bit vague (I'm new to this, remember), but anything is helpful.