My journey into real estate really started when I bought my first house back in 2014. To me the process of finding a home was so exciting I couldn't wait to go look at any and every house I could within our budget. I imagine this feeling is not unique to me, after all finding that place to call your own home has a sense of pride that I was not able to have when I was renting or living with my parents. At the time of my first home purchase I was working in retail for a company you might have heard of, Verizon. Now for anyone who has had the pleasure of working in the cell phone industry or retail in general you know how draining that can be. Scheduling can change so much from week to week, and a lot of holidays that are normally days off to spend with family become days you are required to work because those become the best days to sell. I felt like I wanted more for my life than to be working retail for a large corporation my whole life. I started that journey to try and figure out what else I could do. The first thing I tried was getting into coding. I would spend a lot of my free time on my computer watching videos trying to learn HTML, and then CSS and so on. Learning to code on my own was becoming increasingly difficult without support from a teacher or other students learning at the same level as me. It also became less interesting the farther I got into it. This went on for roughly a year. Id spend months really working at it, then there would be months I wouldn't spend much time coding at all. Then it occurred to me as I am in my house looking at homes online through RedFin, I think I want to try real estate. Ive met so many real estate agents through personal relationships and also those that I met through my time at Verizon. I was curious, so I started to ask any agent I met how they liked being an agent and what the job entailed. What I found was without exception the agents I met, stranger or someone I had already met loved their job. This was something I was looking for, a career I can go after. The final straw was a chance encounter with my former basketball coach from high school. His name is Mike Connor and he currently runs the City Realty Inc firm I am a part of. That day in Verizon he came by to buy a new phone for his wife. We happened to be really slow that day and I was walking to the back room when I saw him working with one of my co workers. I stopped to say hi, and we got to talking and he mentioned he was a real estate agent working in the area (I couldn't remember what he did from high school). I had just signed up through RockWell Institute to start my real estate journey when this meeting happened. I mentioned I was taking some courses in real estate and asked if I could come by for a visit to get a better idea of what I was working towards. That meeting at Verizon and then the follow up meeting at his office later changed my life. I knew after that meeting I had chosen the right path. So I went to working on the online classwork to finish my real estate course. My advice to anyone reading this who is going to be taking the course or is currently taking the course is to focus on the amount of quizzes you have to finish. I was focused on the number of hours required to complete each section. Section 1 requires a minimum of 60 hours, and section 2 requires 30. I was under the impression once I hit those hours the course would be done. What I didn't realize was that you needed to pass a certain number of quizzes in each section to take the final exams for each section. What I thought was going to be 60 hours for section 1 turned out to be around 200 hours of work, and the section section was over 100. I found the best strategy to be figure out how many quizzes you need to pass per week to finish in a certain amount of time and reverse engineer it that way. But I am proud to say I finished my coursework and I am now set to take my license exam at the end of December. I will get back to you on how that goes, but study study study is how I plan to succeed. I hope this post helps someone or inspires anyone. I plan on sharing new posts whether it is tips on becoming an agent or tips for home buyers or sellers. Talk to you guys soon!
