Starting Real Estate Early - Desire to Learn in Real World

[Alex E Boyd]

Hello All!

My name is Alex Boyd and I am 20-year-old Chemical Engineering student attending college in Southwest Michigan. Hopefully this is a good forum location to begin this conversation, apologies if it is not. I have recently become interested in the prospects of real estate investing from Brandon Turner's book, The Book on Rental Property Investing. That was about 6 months ago and I have spent the time since then educating myself from the Rich Dad Poor Dad series, The One Thing by Gary W. Keller, The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, The Real Book on Real Estate Investing by Robert Kiyosaki, etc. along with days worth of information from the early BiggerPockets Podcast episodes. 

I would like to turn my education efforts to the real world, but being a college student don't have much money to put in the game at this time. With that said, I believe I could be a valuable asset as an intern based on previous experiences; however, all of my experience is in process and project engineering. By posting this I am hoping to get my name out there, but I am also curious about what areas of real estate would be the most beneficial to pursue and accessible to internship opportunities? My long-term goal is to build a portfolio of buy-and-hold multi-family rental properties starting with a duplex/triplex house hack. Roughly by the time I am 35, I would like to have 25 properties that can support a yearly income so I work because I want to not because I have to. I have given plenty of thought to attempting to work for individual investors mainly to learn acquisition strategies, but without much experience I feel I would simply weigh on the profits too much. I have also wondered about working for project management companies to become familiar with this side of the business.

Any advice on starting early with lack of funds would be appreciated more than you know.

[Eunice Villarroel]

Hi there and congratulations on your journey to becoming a real estate investor.

Number one I recommend you live with your parents as much as possible in order to save enough money to buy a house.Learn how to live below your means.

Number two I recommend you talk to a lender even if you don’t have enough money saved up .it’s always good to learn what you need and a lot of lenders are extremely helpful and can give you a roadmap that you can follow in order to get to your goal of owning your own property.

Number three .Stay away from Financing a vehicle. Buy a used car paid in full. The reason for this is that when the time does come for you to buy a house that that on your car will be used against you and you will not be able to afford a house or you qualify for a smaller house.

Number four. attend your local real estate group meet up events. You can find them on Facebook. Nothing beats face to face contacts.

Number five but should definitely be above the top three always educate your mind. Do you like real estate? That’s great read about it, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos.

You got this. I hope you found this helpful. I wish you all the best on your journey :-)