Best Job In America: Real Estate Investor

Hello! David J here again bringing you more of the steps on my journey toward financial independence.

I saw an article on Yahoo! recently about the best jobs in America and thought this would be a good way to express what being a real estate investor is all about. It's not a "job", of course, it's a way of life. Still the format seems suitable...

Real Estate Investor

1. Pay Scale: $0 - $300,000+ annually

The money one can make really is unlimited. The only real limit is you and your willingness to do what it takes to succeed.

2. What Do They Do All Day?

An investor's day can be as full as you want or as easy, depending on what needs to be done to achieve your goals at any specific time.

For example, to start your day, you might review various sources of property leads and find any you'd like to visit and analyze that day and then schedule your activities for the day. Then, make some phone calls to attend to the details of deals in progress, maintain contact with your network of fellow investors, title company agents, realtors, and others.

Then, visit the properties you selected earlier, sit down with a notepad and calculator and work the numbers, make decisions about the ones where the numbers look like they add up and decide how to prepare offers and letters of intent to acquire them.

In the late afternoon and evening, you might meet with your accountants and attorneys to discuss the deals you're working on, network some more, have dinner with your contacts, colleagues and friends.

3. How to Get the "Job"

There's no place to interview for this type of a "job", it's really a choice of life style, life course and life goals. If anything, you'll interview yourself to see if you're ready to embrace a paradigm very different from that with which most of us are raised from youth.

By far, the greatest challenge is letting go of one's comfort zone and embracing a new idea of what it means to be an employer rather than an employee, a leader rather than a follower, the one who determines the instructions rather than simply following them.

Only you can decide whether you can be comfortable determining your own income rather than trading your time for dollars, rather than depending on someone else to provide a salary or an hourly wage, rather than depending on someone else to provide work for you to do, supervision and management, a work place, and so on.

4. What Makes It Great?

Real estate investors today are contributors to society at a time when their work is very much needed to preserve and restore the available housing stock, to provide clean, safe, sanitary, affordable housing at a time when borrowers are crippled by credit all but destroyed thru no fault of their own - back in 2009, banks cut credit lines and closed accounts causing credit scores to experience a drop from which they have yet to recover - and crippled by job loss, loss of home equity, loss of retirement account value and economic conditions not seen in this country in almost a century.

Today's real estate investors have had to be creative about borrowing since institutional lending all but stopped. Now, investors can help people recover the value in retirement accounts and achieve returns on their retirement savings that banks, stocks and other options simply can't provide right now.

Real estate investors have been leading the creation of construction and rehab jobs since builders and developers folded up under the pressure of the collapsing economy.

Additionally, by taking foreclosed homes off of lenders' inventories, they're helping the lending environment heal itself and keep banks from failing and from costing the government money when banks fail.

5. What's The Catch?

Wow! That could be a whole series of posts in itself! So, let me summarize...

To start with, with the lending climate the way it is, almost the only available source of financing for real estate deals is private lenders and hard money. So, the investor needs to be not just a transactional analayst and engineer, the investor must be a diplomat, a team builder, a charismatic leader who can attract others to one's efforts to help provide housing where it is needed.

Few of us were taught about money or business at home, and most of us not even in school. So a major challenge is acquiring eduction on the topics surrounding the process of real estate investing.

Another major challenge is that so many less than scrupulous people have tainted the image of the real estate investing profession that one may face a great deal of skepticism from one's neighbors and family. Investors have a reputation as greedy people who take advantage of people in bad situations. This will require you maintain utmost integrity and honesty at all times. Deals must always provide a "win" for everyone involved.

So, there you have it. That's the "job description" for a real estate investor.

Have ya got the guts for it? Do you have "the right stuff"?

We'll talk again soon!

Take care - be well!

Much Success!