Whether you get licensed before or after graduation is up to you and the available opportunities at the time.Once you are graduated and licensed, I would seek to become a member of a team as an admin, transaction coordinator, or even a buyer's or seller's agent in a learning environment from a team leader or managing broker who can and will take you under their wing and teach you the ropes, which will launch your career the right way.From there, with some success on the residential side, I would proceed on the commercial side to round out your education, then decide from there where you really want to place a stake in the concrete and move ahead.The above may well be a 5 year plan at minimum, but no one ever got anywhere in this business of any other without a plan and a roadmap.Best of luck to you!

In today's current market environment with the increased prices self managing makes sense in most situations. 

But cash flow smooths out many a bump in the road.So where does that leave you - Well Boulder has been an incredible appreciation market. 

Prior to joining BP I was learning and reading on my own when I stumbled across the site and found all of the information to be incredibly useful.

You can also substitute calcium or magnesium chloride for the salt and it works incredibly well, but that gets expensive.

Originally posted by @Jeff Wallace:Well, I did have an endgame number - but after traveling for the majority of last summer, I realized that I couldn’t wait to get back into “the game” - travel and recreation left me somewhat personally unsatisfied - so, I guess to a small degree I will always be looking for the next “deal”I hear you, traveling is incredible in small doses.  

Thank you, everyone, for your incredibly useful and informative input.

Large and national may give you scale of price but be harder to talk strategically with. and you may find that your experience is still determined by the quality and experience of sales person you are assigned to.There's a lot of moving parts but as you can imagine, if the IRS is going to give you an incredible gift like the 1031 to leverage your portfolio it's going to come with some hoops and strings :)

See the bottom of this article.The incredibly high housing prices drive people further and further out.

*grins  Just be aware that could possibly affect your resale value down the road.From what I have seen (I toured a modular home plant near Elkhart, IN) and read in various trade magazines, modular homes are very well built, surpassing stick built homes in many cases due to a controlled climate and environment during manufacturing.