What would you tell your 19 year old self?

[Bailey Kramer]

Hey, Bigger pockets community. My name is Bailey Kramer and I am 19 years old.  I am just beginning my real estate journey and have fallen in love with the idea of multi-family as an investment strategy.  I have a base knowledge from books, podcasts, youtube videos, and reading forums, but I definitely want to get first-hand experience.  I am most interested in multi-family properties because I love the scalability potential amongst many other things.  I would love to hear about your story in the real estate industry, and if you could, answer the question, "What would you tell your 19-year-old self?"

[Joseph Cacciapaglia]

I would tell my 19 year old self to skip college, skip graduate school, skip law school, don't buy any of the guru's courses, then go get a real estate license, find a broker with an in-house property management team and a great training/mentor program, start selling properties, find some successful investors to work with, and model their business. Also, spend much less time reading about real estate, and a lot more time building a team and making offers. Once you've read 5-7 great books on real estate, there isn't that much more to learn, until you actually start doing. Maybe read one book a quarter, instead of 1 a week (that's what I did for the first several years). You don't need to know a lot about several strategies, you need to gain experience with one. Which one doesn't really matter. Don't be afraid to give up a lot of equity, to get your first several deals going.