My real estate career now stands at two decades. One decade as a sales person and another decade as a broker and owner.
My 20 years of experience has made me realize a simple truth—Selling real estate isn’t selling homes at all. For the most part real estate agents sell financing.
Although cash sales represented almost a third of real estate transactions in 2022, most of those sales were by institutional investors. The question becomes “where did those investors acquire the funding?”
Financing.
Recently I read an article about REIT giant American Homes for Rent who borrowed 500 million dollars to purchase and build rental homes. Or course those homes show that they were purchased with cash, which is true, however, in the end the houses were acquired with borrowed money.
Once I realized that finance is the most important aspect of real estate it dawned on me that I needed to understand more about our financial system and how it operates. So I went down the rabbit hole and began studying everything there is about our monetary system, economics, trading, stocks, bonds, geo politics, the Federal Reserve system, and ultimately I studied currencies.
Why does any of this matter?
If you decide you want to pursue a career in real estate, I would tell you the same thing I tell everyone—don’t quit your day job and build your real estate practice with your spare hours.
Why?
Commissioned sales jobs are unreliable sources of income and can leave gaps, your day job can plug those gaps until you have built a business that is self sustaining.
I also encourage anyone who becomes an agent to also be a real estate investor. These properties can provide additional streams of income for later years in your career when you can finally lose the day job.
Becoming an investor requires you to understand the monetary system. How do you raise funds for your next purchase? How do you manage cash flow? Should you invest in other dividend producing vehicles like stocks and bonds?
Ultimately, you won’t fail in real estate because of lack of sales. You’ll fail because you run out of cash. You’ll fail because you haven’t studied the financial system and how real estate, like all assets, is tied directly to interest rates and the direction of the economy.
Do you know that mortgage rates are based on the yield of a 10 year U.S. Treasury Bond? Why would that be important? Is the economy growing? Or slowing? Or crashing?
Do these questions matter to a real estate agent?
The truth is that without financing most homes would be out of reach.
Want to become a real estate agent?
Learn the ins and outs of the financial markets. Decide to understand what real estate agents truly sell—debt.
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