College Student looking to get started! Any tips?

What city are you in?

A ton of great tips above me … to echo a few and add a few:

  • podcasts - they are free, there’s a ton of them. research the real estate strategy that you want to learn about (flipping, buy/hold, investing, notes) and dive on in
  • try to find a mentor - working for free for someone is a great way to gain some incredible experience - that’s what i did in college, worth it!
  • network - attend local real estate meetups
  • fail fast and fail often!

There are some ways of passive investment in real estate that doesn’t require much money. Like REITs and crowdfunding platforms. Personally I prefer crowdfunding. There are some platforms like realtybundles, for example, that offer to invest 1000 euros that isn’t a big amount of money. There are other platforms too, you can search for them.

If you can scrape together a down payment to buy a house, you could “house hack”.

That basically involves buying a house, living in one room yourself and renting out the extra room. That way you can cover your own housing costs, which allows you to save a bit of cash to buy your next rental property.

If that works for you, try looking for a house with at least 3 bedrooms, if not 4-5.

What about the experience: read more articles, forums, and books, ask for advice, watch webinars and so on. It will be very useful for you, I think.

Being on forums like this and Bigger Pockets is a good start. The bigger pockets podcast is also quality so listen to it in your car or when you walk. I would also attend your local REIA meetings and get to know people. See if you can help some experienced investors out so you can learn from them. Great that you are looking to get into real estate early, keep it up.

Saw this post is a little older, but if you’re still keeping up with it then I have some good insight.

I graduated from college 3 years ago. I bought a house and rented it out by the room to 4 other guys (I also lived there).

This paid for my mortgage and a little on top. This was a $200,000 house and I only put down $8500 all-in.

You don’t even need two years of proof of income to get a loan - if you are going into a field of work that relates to your major that will cover your two year proof of income.

This was before COVID so lending might be a little more strict now.