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Commercial real estate advisor: How I got my job and where I'm going

Starting a career in real estate involves learning from the ground up, often beginning in a support role. Persistence, time in the market, and building trust are key to success. Local knowledge and a good reputation are crucial. The ultimate goal is to generate passive income through property ownership.

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Video transcript

I didn't specifically seek out to be a broker. Instead, I was searching for a company that was the right size, and I was looking for a mentor. The typical path of someone getting into this business is you don't start initially as a broker. You'll take on some sort of a support role, so that you can learn the back end of contracts, database research. Something that you're gonna need as a real estate broker. And so I would say that if you're starting in this business in your 20s or early 20s, you're gonna fill that type of a role. Then you'll move into a broker. You'll start typically under a more senior broker, and work for him generating leads and learning the business, learning how to hunt. Most brokers from there split off and create their own teams. They go off on their own. And they'll do that individually, they'll do that with a partner. In order to be successful in this business, you have to have the mindset that nobody will give you anything. That you have to go out and take it. There's a very, very steep learning curve. And so, I would say another thing that you need to be successful is persistence. Again, success in this business is time in the market. And so, you have to stick with it to build your knowledge and the relationships and the trust, in order to start seeing deals, and start, you know, taking things down. Real estate is local. Especially at my level. I don't talk to clients who, you know, they're buying property all over the country. A lot of my clients live in Denver or only invest in Denver. And so, while the real estate industry might be huge, the real estate in the Denver metro area is pretty small. And that is not just the professional network, that's also the investor network. There's so much, it's not that big. And so, your reputation sticks with you. They want to go with the person that they can trust. And that goes a long way, as well, in being successful. My long-term aspirations are to take the money that I'm earning and go buy real estate with it. And build up a large enough passive income to where I can then go do things that I think are fun. I think eventually that will be in development and creating things, creating property. And just giving back and becoming a part of the civic fabric of Denver, is something that I very much want to do. But I want to do after I've secured a stable passive income from the properties that I own.