Are you flipping houses or buy-and-holding but still wondering how to actually hit at least $10,000 per month in real estate income? Many investors get stuck here – including me – trying to replace a full-time job with another full-time job: real estate.
After flipping dozens of houses and owning rentals, I realized I was trapped in active income. What changed everything was comparing the numbers side by side. In this article, we’ll break down flips, rentals, and multifamily deals to see which path really leads to freedom. You’ll walk away knowing how to evaluate each strategy and why scaling up may be simpler than you think.
Rentals Build Equity, But Scaling Takes Forever
Lots of now-real estate investors start with single-family homes. They’re familiar, they build equity, and they’re less intimidating than large deals. So let’s take a look at the potential returns of one single-family rental.
Let’s use Atlanta as our model market with a median home price of $400,000. Your cash flow might be $200 per month — about $2,400 a year. If property values rise by 5% annually, after five years, that first home is worth $510,000.
You sell it, pay about 9% in sales costs, and pocket $65,000. Not bad — but over that same five-year period, you’ve only made about $100,000 total from cash flow and appreciation combined. After ten years, assuming you buy one rental each year, maybe you’ve purchased $4 million worth of real estate, but you’ve only cleared around $500,000.
That sounds big until you realize it took a decade and constant effort. You’re managing tenants, repairs, and financing while watching your monthly income barely cross $10,000. To reach true financial freedom with single-family rentals, you’d need about 50 doors producing steady cash flow — and that’s just not realistic for most people managing on their own.
Make sense so far? Let’s move onto a similar scenario: fix-and-flips.
Flipping Pays Fast, But It’s Still a Job
Very similarly to rentals, fix-and-flips are also a very popular start for real estate investors.
Let’s say you buy a distressed property (in Atlanta) for $260,000, put $55,000 into renovations, and another $4,500 in holding costs. You sell it for $400,000 after six months. After paying commissions, closing costs, and taxes, your net profit lands around $48,000.
- Purchase Price: $260,000
- Renovations: $55,000
- Holding Costs: $4,500
- Sale: $400,000
- Net Profit: $48,000
Realistically, you can expect to do a deal like that around twice a year, so you’d make close to $100,000 in year one. That’s already more than the rentals from our last example.
The difference between the two is that flips are more active than rentals. Every deal demands your attention, your time, and your capital. You’re only making money when you’re actively flipping, and once you stop, so does your income.
Even if you scale up, there’s a ceiling. I flipped 36 houses over 3 years (12 a year), and managing contractors, permits, and timelines across multiple projects can quickly burn you out. I was working close to 60 hours a week.
That’s why I believe that flipping houses is more like a full-time job than real estate investing.
Multifamily Unlocks Bigger Numbers and Passive Income
Now let’s shift to multifamily – apartments. Suppose you purchase a $4 million apartment building (about 25 units), which is the average size deal our students do. It’s not that big at all. You’ll likely bring in partners: someone to help raise capital while you find and manage the deal, or the other way around.
That partnership is called a joint venture, and when scaled up, a syndication.
You might need $1.6 million in equity for that deal, which is a lot more than our other scenarios. But here’s where this model changes.
Investors (like you) can raise that money from Limited Partners (LPs). You’d have some skin in the game too, but the majority of it you’ll raise from others with the help of your partners. You’d manage the property, update the investors, and deliver returns to all parties.
And as a “reward,” the General Partners (you and your partners), you pay yourself fees for putting the whole apartment deal together.
- Acquisition fees – typically 3% of the purchase price. On a $4 million deal, that’s $120,000 split among the partners, paid at closing.
- Asset management fees – ongoing income for overseeing the property.
- Cash flow distributions – your share of the property’s profits every quarter.
- Profit on sale – often hundreds of thousands after five years.
Even splitting profits with a partner, you might earn $80,000 in year one. By year two — when your next deal is $5 million or more — you could be earning $125,000 a year or higher. Within five years, total compensation can exceed $2.2 million. After ten years, those numbers can reach $6.6 million.
Compare that to the $500,000 from rentals or flips over the same period. The difference isn’t small — it’s exponential. And unlike flipping, multifamily scales easily because it’s a team sport. You can delegate property management, investor relations, and operations while still building wealth.
Looking Ahead: From Deals to Syndications
Multifamily investing is the bridge between where you are and where you want to go. It’s the only model that combines large returns, leverage, and true passivity in one framework. It’s more passive than the other models and it delivers greater returns that are scalable over the long term.
Hope you enjoyed this article!
To your success,
Michael Blank
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