Should you be a real estate agent or a real estate investor?
This is a common question people wonder about. Cody Davis had the same question when he started. Hear his take on it:
You're likely trying to figure out if you need to become a real estate agent. The first question I'm gonna ask you is, do you want to be a real estate agent? There are pros and cons to both. But there are a lot of folks who think you need to be an agent to be a real estate investor, and that's just not true.
I'll go over some pros and cons on both sides and start off with one little statement heard from a friend in the office, You don't need to be an agent to be a real estate investor, but you should be a real estate investor if you want to be an agent.
So when folks say, Hey, Cody, where do I get started in real estate investing? Should I become an agent? My response is always going to be, Well, do you want to be an agent? Do you want to be a real estate broker?
Because this is a career path, not an investment path.
There are benefits and drawbacks to becoming an agent as your main career path, and you're going to learn a lot more about the investment space if you focus on multifamily real estate as your your specialty when you're becoming a real estate broker. In this process, you're going to be in the space every day, so you're not going to have to study as much outside of your workspace.
You're going to be in it every single day, you're gonna learn how to analyze deals. If you're hanging out the right brokerage, however, it's a little bit harder to get financing. So while you may learn a little bit quicker, it's going to take you longer than if you had a W-2 and you're working another job and a career path.
There's a career path, and then there's an investment field, they don't have to be the same. If you want to use an investment vehicle, such as real estate, multifamily real estate and apartment buildings, that doesn't have to be your daily work. You could go work at McDonald's, but you have to figure out how to make enough money.
How do you build the right connections and learn the right techniques and connect with the right people to get into the real estate space? So while you become a real estate broker, you may learn more. If you make that your specialty, you're going to learn a little bit faster.
If you're working your career path, it's going to be easier to get certain types of financing. If you're trying to do your first deal by yourself, you just need to focus on connections. You can leverage your real estate license. You can use that to go talk with some of the higher up folks at the brokerage and that can be your ticket into the door to get to that table where everyone is playing at the space you want to be playing at. But you have to be really intentional.
At the end of the day, you need to be intentional no matter what. But you need to be really intentional about why you're doing what you're doing. If you want to be a real estate broker, you need to be intentional on why, because at the end of the day, that is a career path. And it's work.
So whether you're doing that, and you're learning about the real estate space as you go, or you get into any other career path, just be intentional. Make sure that you're focused and being very intentional, whichever way you go, but ultimately, you do not need to be a real estate agent to be a real estate investor.
