Real Estate Agent · Wellington, CO · Member since 2017 · 58 posts · 17 votes
Question for BP... would you DIY finish your basement, costing $20k on 24 months no interest financing and adding roughly $50k to your homes equity, or spend those hundreds and hundreds of man hours instead building your real estate business with an end goal of being able to leverage $50-70k to put down on a multi fam property without having to go $15k in debt to create equity, but having no guarantee you'll make it as an agent. Method 1 is much more certain in creating equity to then use on a heloc and method 2 is going straight to work... thoughts. am brand new to the area. very little if any SOI.
Real Estate Agent · Tampa, FL · Member since 2020 · 411 posts · 373 votes
5y
SOI is gigantic in the RE business and so is $$ investment. I had underestimated how much of both I would need starting out, and TBH had I known I probably would have avoided going this route. It is supremely difficult to get any traction on a shoestring budget because all the success stories sound like "well we dropped $7k in this marketing campaign and $7k in that other marketing campaign and after spending about $750k total we made over two million last year." Dude. And for those of us starting slim we get told "just call the people you know." I know 15 people in this state and 12 of them wouldn't pick up the phone if I called (ex, former co-workers). It's a grind and my savings is on vapors. I love the business, I love selling, I love working with people, but I just didn't get into this racket with enough startup capital. Nobody warned me about that.
But if you DO have the capital you might have a totally different experience. You'll be able to afford real marketing campaigns, lead gen services, etc., to where you can really get some ROI going.