How I Got Started in Real Estate

First to give you a little background about myself, I have been buying and selling real estate for over 15 years. I got started because I was working on my graduate degree and I started looking at how much money I would be making when I graduated.

It looked like I could get a job for around $50,000 per year a little more if I would be willing to relocate to some other major city. The idea of moving to another city to try and make an extra $10,000 per year was not a real exciting option to me.

Then I ran into Tom, a friend of my parents. Tom was retiring, he said he didn’t need any more money and wanted to just do some traveling and spend his days playing golf.

He was 41 years old, and owned over 100 houses that he rented out.

I crunched some numbers and figured he was making a minimum of $500 per house from the rents. That would give him an income of about $50,000 per month.

I kept thinking about me getting up and going to work everyday, from 8am to 5pm. Five days a week, while Tom was sleeping in, traveling the world, and playing golf… Making more money in a month than I would be making in a year.

That’s making more money than me by not counting any appreciation on the houses, and these houses are all located in California. (To give you an idea, in 2004 each one of those houses went up in value a minimum of $100,000 that’s a cool extra 10 million in Tom’s pocket).

After that I started looking for my first house to buy…

I decided that I like making money, I don’t really like working really hard for it. I just like making it.