Aerospace engineer wants to get into real estate

[Jason H.]

Hello everyone,

Excited to join BiggerPockets - looks like a tremendous community here.

I'm brand new to real estate. Never purchase a home, plot of land, or property of any kind. But investing in real estate is something I've been extremely interested in for a long time.

For the last 16 years I've been an aerospace engineer for NASA in Pasadena, California (still am). Living on your own in Los Angeles with student loan debt has been rough on my bottom line to say the least - I basically have zero capital for investing. So I thought getting a real estate license might help that. Figured I'd help friends and family buy/sell their homes, save the commissions, and then start investing.

I received my license earlier this year, got hired by a broker, ordered business cards, put up a website, etc. I'm now struggling with deciding what to do with this license...

1. Should I be searching for buyer clients?
2. Should I be out competing for listings?
3. Should I act as an investor-facing agent?

#3 appeals to me since I'm ultimately interested in being an investor myself. Might as well learn the analysis methods and techniques now and help those with capital purchase them. I also have friends that are investing in real estate, so maybe I could spend my time bringing good finds and buyers together. But is that really a good way to earn money as an agent?

Also, during my 16 years at NASA and doing web development on the side, I've become pretty proficient at data mining and data analysis/modeling. This includes machine learning and neural networks. I think this stuff can significantly impact the way investors analyze deals. So I'll throw out a fourth:

    4. Investor consulting: help individual investors and/or institutional investors improve the confidence and accuracy of their analyses.

I'm sure I'll get more direction after reading through and participating in the forums. Any advice is welcome.

Jason

[David Faulkner]

Welcome! I actually used to work at JPL as well, and bought my first property nearby in Glendale. Congrats on getting your license. I would probably start on the retail side helping home buyers and sellers ... you will need to work both listings and with buyers to succeed as an agent. Talk with some of the top producing agents at your broker and see if you can host open houses for them ... you may be able to pick up some clients that way. Tell everyone you know (including co-workers) that you are an agent and to let you know if they know of anyone that may need help buying or selling a property. Anytime you get a client, go out of your way to serve their financial interests and knock it out of the park ... every satisfied client turns into many more referrals if you keep this in mind to think and act in terms of long term client relationships rather than short term RE transactions.

Working with investors or as a consultant without much experience yourself in the field would be more difficult, so that would likely come later. You can start working on learning a niche that may help you there though, like probates, REOs, short sales, marketing for off market sellers (which you can turn to listings or eventually investments), etc. Your own primary residence would be the best place to start IMO with your own investments.