Are you investing part-time?

[Jean T.]

I started investing in real estate last year. I still have a day job that I like and keeps me pretty busy during the day, and often at night. So I was wondering who on BP is investing part-time like me.

I've bought 3 properties so far in the past 8 months or so. Each property is at a different stage.

- Property 1 was rehabbed with hard-money and sold on a lease-option. I am currently working with a broker to refi out of the hard-money. In this economy, things aren't looking too good. I just found out today that one bank wouldn't underwrite my loan because the existing loan is with a hard-money lender.

- Property 2 rehab has just finished and is currently being marketed to find a retail or lease-option buyer.

- Property 3 was purchased on a land contract, 7-months, no payments. I am on the third month, and nothing has started. The first two properties were financed with the same hard-money lender, and they are not financing any more with me. I am reluctant to find new lenders for fear of how their credit checks would affect my chances to refi out of properties 1 and 2.

When I read some of the posts on BP, I read about people doing a lot during the day. Many phone calls are made. Where are those who are doing this part-time and can only do anything at night and on weekends. How do you cope?

My best method to work around this is to use email. In my current job, I'm on the phone with clients all the time. But I'm also on email all day too, so I can easily and quickly respond to an email on my lunch break or something, which doesn't last very long at times since I can get bogged down with work.

So I'm just curious and hoping to get some ideas from what part-time investors are doing or have done before they went full-time.

Thanks.