Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z How to Quit Your Job and Become a Full Time Real Estate Investor?
What steps should you take to be able to quit your job and become a full time real estate investor? Bronson Hill, a syndicator and investor at Bronson Equity, who not only raised $15 million for his deals, but also just quit his job shares his path with us.
You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3olStO6
I had zero properties when I quit, but you did the right thing and you had real estate income before quitting. Can you share how your journey went?
I admire you as well because like a lot of people say, I’m doing it, this is my new direction, burn the boats and just quit the job and I’m just going to go 100% into it. They do mentorship or other things, and then other people are a few months short of retirement and they’ve everything set up and all of a sudden they leave but I think I was somewhere in between. But there is a range of what people feel comfortable with.
I had this relationship with my cousin and it has become a very transformational relationship. What he said to me was, everybody that he talked to wishes they had started in multifamily sooner. That principle really is the ability to scale or the ability to use other people's money, no matter how much money you have, no matter how much money you make. I had a couple of physicians that I worked with who made over $3 million a year, but they worked 80 hours a week. They weren't really financially free, they were kind of chained to have to go do that job. If something happened to them, they were disabled, they wanted to leave, they would just lose all of that income.
Ask yourself, if adding another house, a duplex, a small multifamily, or whatever it is, is just completely overwhelming. If it feels like just way more work, then it's not really passive. That's a good passive or active test. There's really no such thing as a passive investment, but the idea of some things that are more passive.
Were you able to cover your expenses by the time you left? You don't have to share exact numbers.
I live pretty modestly, especially for LA, I just rent a place here, we have $150 million in real estate assets in Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Georgia. For me, I was able to at 40 to 50k, now it's more than that, but I was able to say, I can cover my living expenses based on this. And then each time I do a deal, I get an acquisition fee. Now in reality, I've reinvested most of the acquisition fees back in the deals that I'm doing. But then over time, when you do deals, you'll have things start to cash out. So there's some money coming from this deal. Or everybody is rolling from this deal to another. We had a deal recently that we bought in Jacksonville in March for $27 million it was a 288 unit multifamily complex. And we just sold it in December for $37.5 million. It was a huge profit, that was a 75%-100% return. But for me, we're 1030 wanting that in the next deal. And then there are some fees when we go to the next deal. There's some opportunity there.
When deals sell, there are opportunities there. In some ways it's kind of feast or famine, but I feel like I'm investing in the business. I'm growing, I'm learning, and I'm covering my expenses. And I'm continuing to see my net worth grow. In multifamily in particular, you're doing these long term deals, you know that the money's there, you know it's coming, but you don't always see it right away. You're taking less up front, but still with these acquisition fees, they add up enough to at least cover the business expense and cover my living expenses, and they continue to grow my net worth.
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