Hi guys, My goal is to work full time as an investor. I am a former operations manager in the manufacturing world. Was laid off a few months back. I think it would be valuable to work in the real estate field before getting into investing more on my own. To all the full time investors out there, what job would have been most beneficial to you when you were getting started? What avenue should I pursue? Agent? etc... 

Acquisitions manager and project manager

First I would ask yourself what aspect of the business are you best at or have the most natural ability. Then pursue that as a full time job. Personally I would want to work for a private equity firm or REIT on acquisitions and analysis.

Brian,

As a starting point, I'm not a full time investor. 

If you want to be a full time investor,  you need to decide what aspect of real estate you want to go with.

Investing in notes / mortgages is a very different from property. Even NPN is different from performing. Commercial is different from SFR and apartments are different from office buildings. They each have their pros and cons.

In general if you want to invest own or manage your own portfolio of properties,  AND you need W2 income an option is going to work for a large national affiliate real estate agency. You could manage multiple offices, for an owner broker or for the franchise company. Those jobs are not easy to find, but can help you understand the real estate game from the brokerage side.

Being an agent probably won't give you W2 income,  unless you get on as part of a team. That would be good, as long as the team was focused on buying and holding property, and not sales.

Working for a bank has some merits as well, loan servicing is good for the notes/mortgage end of things, but you learn a bunch about portfolio management, taxes, insurance, delinquency and a range of other topics. 

Finally, if you can get in with a mortgage company those can be good places to get to understand how deals are underwritten and put together. 

I have been in all the areas mentioned above, (except office /franchise management ) and they all contributed to my understanding of real estate. 

Again, deciding where you want to focus is the first step.

Hope that helps. 

Good luck!

Jim 

Thank you all so much for the input.

The direction id like to go is to build a buy and hold portfolio. Start off with a few more SFR properties and move into multi-family. My biggest challenge now is generating an income to live off of while building a portfolio. I love the idea of an acquisitions manager type position but I've had no luck finding anything like that so far. This is why I am considering becoming an agent. It seems like I could generate a decent steady income and I do have some sales experience in another industry.