[box] Hey There! Just a heads up, the post you're about to read is from our new guest contributor and multifamily investor, Cody Davis. Cody is going to be popping in here and there on our blog and YouTube channel to share some of his experience with you and also to connect with those of you we like to call our “Young Deal Makers” get started in multifamily investing. You too can create financial freedom for yourself with real estate investing. We'll show you how. [/box]

There's one question that Michael and myself get asked A LOT.

Should I go to college or should I jump into multifamily real estate?

This is a huge topic. 

People don't know whether they should make the jump all in or whether they should wait and play the safe route …..if there is such a thing. 

The fact is, you get into multifamily any time you want. 

You can do it now or you can begin later. The opportunities are there.

Three years ago, I was going to Tacoma Community College. I ended up needing to make that shift for myself and I ended up dropping out.  

Of course, there are pros and cons to this.

The number one thing you really need to get before  jumping into the multifamily investing space, is that you need to be certain about what you're doing and if you're not, you need to acquire information that you need to become to be certain. 

Now, certainty comes in different forms. 

I acquire knowledge or information and connections so that I'm certain about the opportunity I'm looking at now. 

Opportunity in my world means real estate opportunity. In your world could mean a higher earned income. And that could come from getting a college education. 

It could also come from apartment building or real estate investing.

It depends on what you want to have as your job.  

One job could be going into a profession. You spend fours years in college and then look for the opportunity.

If you make $80,000 or $120,000 a year after college, you're still spending four years of time. And that's the cost of the opportunity there.

If you jump straight into multifamily, you're not going to make much right away. It requires you to put on entrepreneur hat. Each person has to figure out how to do that for themselves.You have to figure out okay, how do I actually make money? How do I add value to someone like an investor?

Making the decision of college versus multifamily is really going to come down to finding an opportunity to improve a community. 

Let's say you're driving around and you go see that old apartment building, every town has one of these, every town, every city in the US has an apartment building that is not performing as well as it should. Maybe there's trash on the lawn. Maybe the tenants aren't paying because there's no professional management. 

There could be many reasons but you just drive around and you can usually pick out that apartment building. All you have to do now is create a story. People connect with stories. 

If I could talk to my younger self, just a few years ago, I would have said, learn how to tell a story.

It's so important and whether you're going to go to college or jump into multifamily, especially if you're jumping into multifamily. The story that you're able to present to an investor is going to help determine how successful you are. 

So you find this property, maybe the owner inherited it a few decades ago, they're just keeping rents low. And maybe the trash isn't getting cleaned as it should so you can see a few wrappers on the lawn. Now you can craft a story.

You can look up the property on the tax assessor's website and see that it's assessed really low and sold a long time ago. They don't have to raise the rent because they have no debt. They have no payments. Well now here's your opportunity. Your story, “Hey Mr. Mrs. investor, I found this great opportunity. It's mismanaged, the rents are low. This is the amount of money that it's going to take to invest in this opportunity. This is what our proforma is going to look like.”

All of a sudden you turn a story into an opportunity and it's the Law of the First Deal. Once you get your first multifamily real estate deal, it's going to be a lot easier to then go and leverage that story and leverage the connection that you've made with those investors and use that as your credibility to jump into a new space.

So whether you're going through college, whether you're going through multifamily, neither way is going to get you rich overnight. With that said, one other question you should ask is What's the game you really want to play in the long term? Do you want to be in a professional career that you're going to go to every day? Or do you want to be a multifamily investor?

Some people think they have to go to college prior. And that's just not true. So if you want to be a multifamily investor, you should start today. And whether you're buying or you're just learning about it. If you want to be in the multifamily space full time, you can, but if you want to play the game, you got to start playing the game.

And there's no better time than today to start.  I promise you, if you work on this every day a little by little, this is gonna start to stick. You've got to really work towards that first deal. Don't worry about the rest. You're not there yet, but work on that first deal. You can make it happen.