Days filled with touring beautiful properties to help clients realize their dreams of owning property. The thrill of unearthing hidden gems with that perfect charm. Even the option to expand into other states or experiment with side hustles that crossover into other industries. These opportunities combined with the freedom to roam out of the office and away from the typical 9-5 work schedule is a big reason why young professionals and recent college graduates are considering a career in real estate.
With so many side hustles and pathways available, a career in real estate is never just a career in real estate. Below, we review five real estate side hustles that offer maximum career flexibility.
The Insurance Industry
Real estate and insurance naturally overlap and often involve the same pool of clients. Earning an insurance license in addition to a real estate license can help you make the most of each opportunity by offering more services to your clients. With both licenses, you can provide clients with insights into insurance considerations when buying or selling a property, such as homeowners insurance or title insurance. You could even tailor insurance coverage for real estate investors planning to rent out their property.
If you find a passion in insurance, you can even venture into several different lines, such as property and casualty or life and health. In fact, some life insurance professionals also work as certified financial planners to help clients maximize their investments through variable annuities—more on that in the next section.
If you’re interested in exploring a career in insurance, check out our free eBook, The Ultimate Guide for Starting a Career in Insurance to see if it’s right for you.
Financial Advising
Both real estate and insurance intersect with financial planning and investing. Earning an additional certification, such as becoming a Certified Financial Planner, can expand your services even further into finance and investment. From land and property investments to rental properties to fixer-uppers, expanding your services into financial advising offers a lucrative pathway to carve out your niche.
Life and health insurance producers also see an overlap with financial advising in variable annuities. Mastering the insurance’s variable annuity and its connection to retirement planning is the first step in expanding from real estate to insurance into financial planning. These professionals offer clients insights into their investment options as well as strategies to help them reach their investment goals.
Some investment products require a securities credential, creating another opportunity to branch out into the lucrative securities industry. Trade stocks, manage assets, assess risk, and more. Working in securities is ideal for energetic and ambitious young professionals looking for a challenging career with a rewarding paycheck.
If working in securities sounds like something you’d like to explore, check out our free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Career in Securities.
Seasonal Tax Preparer
Some real estate professionals work as tax preparers during tax season and offer tax services to their clients throughout the year. Often, this means working as a tax preparer during tax seasons, which typically runs between January and April. Then, in the spring, they turn to real estate as the buying and selling market heats up into summer, which is the most popular time of the year to buy and sell properties since school is out and the weather is nice enough to move.
This seasonal approach offers variety and keeps things fresh throughout the year. It also expands your clientele, which is especially important considering how much real estate is about networking and developing relationships. Offering a positive, thorough tax preparation experience could sway that client to call you when buying or selling a property, or vice versa. Expanding the number of services you offer naturally creates more opportunities to offer multiple services to each of your clients.
Real Estate Marketing
Real estate marketing on social media is crucial to developing a brand. Put your social media skills to work by creating content for other real estate professionals looking to expand their clientele or build their brand. This content also allows you to grow and flex your knowledge of the real estate industry by creating content targeted to clients most likely to respond.
If you’re having trouble getting traction, consider reaching out to local rentals on sites like Airbnb or Vrbo to take photos, craft descriptions, or even create social media content free of charge. This offers opportunities to practice and generate examples of your work to share next time you reach out to real estate professionals.
Finding success here could lead you in any number of directions. Use the experience to gather insights for building your own real estate brand. Partnering with real estate businesses can lead to joining that real estate company and launching your real estate career. Or even branch out into marketing full-time by leveraging your real estate industry connections to create your very own marketing agency.
An offshoot of real estate marketing could be property staging to enhance the appeal of a property. This approach offers a unique opportunity to leverage your creativity and style together with your knowledge of market trends and buyer preferences. Often these services involve improving curb appeal through staging, decluttering, or rearranging a space. Effective staging can greatly influence how quickly a property sells and how much it sells for, especially in competitive markets.
As a side hustle, you’re diversifying your skillset and better positioning yourself for any number of potential futures. This side hustle could help launch a property staging business or a greater focus on interior design. And, of course, will enhance your own real estate career by improving your staging when selling properties for your clients.
A career in real estate not only offers the flexibility to make your own schedule away from a typical office job, but offers you the freedom to create the ideal career just right for you. Each of these five side hustles can lead to any number of other careers that are wildly different from a typical real estate career.
And these aren’t the only avenues you can take, just some of the most popular. Other avenues include things like property management, risk management, home inspection services, and event planning. In short, it’s likely that there’s a career lurking at every step of the real estate buying and selling process. How will you make real estate your own?