Hi Dmaybe55,
That’s a great thing to go into. I invest in Real Estate as well as have another business. When it comes to Real Estate, there are so many great business opportunities, both on the management side and the sales side of the business, and you can do both if you want. So it depends on specifically what you want to do. Let’s take a look at two different scenarios as a basic starting point:
First Scenario: You want to focus on Real Estate management- You can own and manage your own building, but you will quickly run into a problem as you will quickly run out of your own money to buy new properties. To make more money you can do a couple of things. You could expand your management business and hire new employees and manage building for other people also, and/or you can raise private money and invest with other people in buildings.
In this scenario, you will want to approach college with the mindset of what skills you want to acquire. So regardless of which major you choose you are going to want to focus on these key areas: management, accounting, finance, economics and possibly marketing. If you want to be a business owner, understanding a wide variety of business skills because your main job will be to manage people who have these skills, not actually implement those skills yourself.
Second Scenario: You want to focus on sales- In this scenario, you can focus on generating revenue first so that you can invest your own money into properties without raising capital from other sources. You can focus on selling commercial and/or residential real estate and you will need your real estate license. If you want to take this route, in college I would focus on similar majors as I referenced in the first scenario, but I would also look into where you can get sales experience either through specific course work, or even better, through great internship opportunities.
This is just an intro into my real estate knowledge, but I hope it is a helpful starting point. So continue to ask questions, it is a great area of business that is not going away any time soon.
Also, if you have more questions about business and entrepreneurship and specifically about studying these in college, you should join my facebook group. I help student with this stuff all the time.