How to Use Real Estate Investing to Build Generational Wealth – Business Insider
- Aaron Galvin, CEO of Luxury Living Chicago Realty, says that real estate is a ‘proven’ path to wealth.
- Other investors who Insider spoke with agree. Real estate investing can generate cash flow, plus there’s appreciation.
- To get started, one investor recommends the “4, 3, 2, 1” strategy, which involves purchasing a fourplex first and “house hacking.”
Aaron Galvin graduated with a degree in public relations and marketing in 2002 and moved to Chicago for a sales job in the beer and spirits industry.
He wasn’t particularly passionate about his work at the time, he concedes.”We were selling a product that I didn’t 100% believe in,” Galvin told Insider, who discovered his side gig — leasing out apartments — during this period. “Helping people find a new home is one of the most, if not the most, financially significant and emotionally significant decisions in somebody’s life.”
Not only did he enjoy his side hustle more, but it paid well.
After eight months of doing both jobs, he got to the point where he was making more from renting out apartments than he was from his 9-to-5. That’s when he decided to leave corporate America and bet on real estate.
Galvin worked with his mentor, an established apartment locator in the area, for three years before starting his own real estate brokerage and marketing business. Since founding LLCR in 2017, it’s grown to 70 employees, has leased more than 18,000 apartments, and sold more than $150 million in for-sale condos.
Galvin, now 42 and a father of two, considers himself “financially secure.”
He can afford a higher standard of living than he had as a kid growing up in Cleveland. “I’m very fortunate,” he said of his financial situation. “I come from a traditional, middle-class family. We lived in a suburb and had a 1,500-square foot, three-bedroom house. I was never concerned that we were going to go without, but there were definitely things that I couldn’t do as a kid that some of my friends could.”
He believes in real estate, particularly the Chicago market. He has a primary home in Chicago but doesn’t own rental properties — that was a pre-
recession
goal, he said: “I had a vision for owning 10 condos by the time I was 30. I bought my first when I was 26. And then the Great Recession changed those plans, so I have since sold all of those condos.” But he invests his money in developments like the proposed 21-story, 248-unit apartment tower in Chicago that he’s co-developing with partners Mavrek Development and GW Properties.
“I’ll invest money in these developments because I believe so strongly in the current and …….