Real Estate has been around for centuries. I have shared a bit in the past on how I decided to pursue a career in real estate; wishing I would have started sooner. Before I dive into this a bit more please understand a bit about me first. I have shared in past writings about having ADHD and learning to tackle that head-on. One of the negative/positive traits about ADHD is the fact that we get excited and dive headfirst into what we are doing but we also get bored very quickly. I always felt like entrepreneurship was the quickest way to independence and wealth. The crazy thing is when all those things are mixed together, sometimes the outcome is not always ideal or positive. More on that in the future with other stories about the success and failure of some of my businesses and the destruction that can have on relationships and finances when it does not go as planned.
Real Estate is generally stable, consistent and extremely rewarding over time. Realtors can choose to practice and specialize in assisting buyers or sellers, putting together land deals, being a representative of a builder or builders, developing raw land for residential, being a leasing agent for commercial properties and commercial development, and representing buyers and sellers in commercial real estate. A realtor can also work with individual investors or a group of investors who buy, sell and invest on a regular basis.
I personally choose three areas as well as handling one-offs occasionally. I work about a third of my time with investors who buy properties, fix them up and then resell them (flip). Additionally, there are times an investor may want to hang on to the property and rent it out which is called buy and hold. This can be very time consuming and very rewarding. Recently, I spent over a year chasing down a property that sat vacant for over two years. The investor purchased the property on the courthouse steps in a foreclosure auction and now he is rehabbing the house which will go up for sale at the end of the month. This, of course, is a highly competitive market because there are a lot of investors who have worked at getting their real estate license and are doing it themselves now.
The second area I focus on is traditional buy and sell: the traditional listing of a home and reselling it, to working with buyers who are in various stages of life (first-time homebuyer), the family who wants to buy some land and build their dream home as well as folks who are transitioning late in life to sell their property.
The final area I focus on is commercial. It has always been a dream of mine to be involved with commercial real estate. For example, I am working with a client now who wants to build a truck driving school. We have identified land and are going through the phase of closing on the land deal as well as rezoning it and ultimately working through the entire planning and zoning process. This is very time consuming but extremely rewarding.
I have been in real estate for two years now. In my first year I completed $2.7 million in gross transactions averaging $150,000 to $175,000 per transaction. I am finishing up 2019 with $4 million in gross transactions averaging $175,000 - $195,000 per transaction. Competing with over 11,000 area realtors and large teams who are producing between $25 million and $60 million a year is a big deal to me.
Recently I was featured in the local paper Courier Tribune. It was a great honor to share a little of my story.
