How I became a Millionaire in Real Estate by 26

What's up you guys? It's Graham here, so I just wanted to share my story and my background about how I became a millionaire by the age of 26. Now just as a quick background here, I started selling real estate as a real estate agent shortly after I turned eighteen years old. So I'm 27 years old now, and in that timeframe, I've sold a little bit over 120 million dollars worth of residential real estate here in Los Angeles.

Now that has given me a little bit over two and a half million dollars worth of commission during that time. But there's a lot more that goes into that than just, you know, X amount of commissions because after taxes and expenses and everything after that, you know, it actually takes quite a lot more than just making, you know, X amount of money to actually be worth over a million dollars, especially by the age of 26.

So I'll break it down. I'll share with you guys exactly step by step what I did because I've seen a lot of these videos about like "how I became a millionaire" and they're all really vague and they never actually give any real information behind it. It's a lot of just kind of fluff and it usually, you know, it kind of leads nowhere. It just kind of goes in circles and you're left like really confused about what they actually do for a living.

So I want to share with you guys everything I did from start to finish, how I came to this point, and hopefully you guys enjoy it. And by the way, I just want to throw this out there, I did not come from any sort of wealthy family whatsoever. No one in my family was working in real estate, and both my parents, by the way, were living paycheck to paycheck.

I grew up in a very tiny home here in Los Angeles of you know, nothing of just like craziness or anything like that. So I don't want you to get the impression that I came from like well-off parents that were like spoon-feeding me deals. It's like, oh no wonder he did, you know, 120 million dollars of the sales because his parents were both in real estate and they, you know, gave him all of these deals and these clients and all of this business.

He started out with zero connections whatsoever. No one in my family was in real estate; my parents knew nobody that was buying and selling multimillion-dollar estates. Both my parents were renters. None of the... I mean they had no money. They were super supportive parents by the way, but it wasn't like they were just like, you know, making it rain for me and stuff like that. So I just want to get that out there.

But a lot of this for me did start when I was like 13 or 14 years old. I was really into reef aquariums and I ended up getting this job at this marine aquarium wholesaler that would import and export exotic fish and coral. My job was to go and take pictures of the inventory that would come in. I would Photoshop it and then I would help put it on their website.

And I got paid $1 for every picture I would photograph and then Photoshop to help put on the website. And I can pretty much get between 20 and sometimes 35 pictures done per hour, which means I was making about twenty to thirty-five dollars per hour, which when you're like 14 or 15 years old and you work a few hours maybe in a day you can make a hundred dollars in a day. And for me at the time that was a ton of money.

And it was at that point when I realized it just like I started really disliking school because I didn't see the point of that. I didn't see how learning science in like freshman year of high school was gonna help make me money. I didn't care about the cells biology, I didn't care about learning algebra, I didn't care about learning history, I didn't care about learning Latin. All I cared about was just making twenty to thirty-five dollars an hour photographing fish and coral and Photoshoping that and putting it on the website.

And that was for me a bit of a downfall when it came to school because that changed my mindset to like all I want to do is work and do things to make money and not so much as to waste time in school. Because of that, my grades started suffering dramatically. And I was never the student that was like getting in trouble and stuff like that, but I just did not care at all about homework. I hated it because I just didn't see the point.

So as soon as I got my driver's license, that was the point where school just really just went downhill because now I can ditch school and I had a car to get to work. And what I would do a lot, maybe one to two days a week, I would completely ditch school and go and work instead. And it was the same thing. I would be sitting in my geometry class thinking like this is a 45-minute class. I can be photoshopping 25 pictures in this time. What would I rather have, 25 bucks or sitting in this stupid class that I'm never gonna do anything with?

And I just would skip, and I had terrible grades in high school, absolutely terrible. Unfortunately, when I was about 16 years old, shortly after that, the business was sold—they shut it down. And at that point, I was four, you know, I'd like, I'm still in high school, but I still don't care about school. And at that time I got into a band and at that point I realized like, you know what, I'm just gonna be a famous drummer, and that was my goal in high school.

I wanted to be a famous musician, and I was a drummer in a band. And not to toot my own horn or anything or not to sound arrogant, but like the band was pretty good and we were touring like the Roxy, the Knitting Factory, we played at the Viper Room. I mean we played like a lot of these cool places on the Sunset Strip. We got our music actually played in a few TV shows and a few like indie movies and stuff like that. They still actually get royalty checks to this day. They're not big. I mean it might be like five or ten cents like every few months, but I still actually get like royalty checks.

And I thought like, you know what, I was gonna be a famous musician. At the same time though, like my schoolwork, I just didn't care about school because I'm like how is this gonna help me be a drummer? How is this gonna help me make money? I didn't see how, you know, science class was really gonna help me, so you know, I continued not to pay attention in school at all and my grades were like C's and D's, and I failed a few classes that I had to then like make up.

Then closer to my senior year of high school, I had this mini realization where there are amazing musicians out there and I didn't want to be one of these dudes who's an amazing musician but he's living out of his van in front of the Roxy theater on Sunset because it's like, it's so competitive as a musician. And I decided at that point that it was the toughest decision I think I've ever had to make and maybe it's one of my few regrets here, but I decided not to pursue the band.

And at that point, I'm realizing like, oh, you know, I don't really know what I want to do, but at the same time, I really loved investing and I love money, and I love making money. So I thought okay, Investment Banking, this is what I want to do. So the senior year of high school I applied to one college because I thought for some reason, I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna get into Pepperdine and it was the only school I applied to.

Now I loved like, I loved Malibu, I loved the campus of Pepperdine and I just applied to that one school. I had like C's and D's and a really low SAT score but I thought, you know what, I'm not even gonna bother applying to other schools because Pepperdine is gonna take me, they're gonna see my potential, and that's it. I didn't get into Pepperdine. Now what?

Now my school was a little weird in that our senior year basically in February we stopped our classes but we didn't technically graduate until June, so I had this weird gap where I didn't really have anything going on from February to June. So I figured, okay, you know what, I'm still gonna get into investing, let me get some sort of job or do something because I'm not going to college now and I did.

I ended up getting a data entry job at this investment firm specializing in precious metals in Santa Monica, and that was this nine-to-five job, this very corporate sort of structure. Hated it. Most depressing time of my life. And I realized like I gave up the band which I loved at the time for this piece that I'm wasting my time at, that I thought this is the route I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to go into Investment Banking.

I thought I wanted to do this corporate structure of business and investments; I thought I wanted that, and I didn't. It was this huge wake-up call to me. It's like I had no clue what I want to do, and I'm thinking like I screwed myself over in school. I didn't pay attention, I had really bad grades. I could still pursue music, but now I don't really have the band anymore. I didn't really have anything at that point.

But I figured, you know what, I could at least get my real estate license for a year and then reapply to colleges. So as I'm getting my real estate license I would go to open houses and I just talked to other agents and asked their opinion about the business and any advice for me. I was just, you know, about to turn 18 at the time studying for my, you know, classes.

And by the way, I was doing all my classes online, by the way, as I hated school. I got like my entire real estate exam and all my licensing done online, which was amazing. But I would go to these open houses and talk to other agents and every single agent was so discouraging. Now keep in mind this is 2008 just as the real estate market was just about to peak and was just starting to go down.

Almost every single agent I met with was telling me something like, "Now it's not a good time to get into real estate, you know, I had to pick up another job, I'm not earning the money that I used to. You should get more life experience, you should go to college, you should come back when you're older.” They weren't telling me the runaround. Basically, everyone was telling me not to get into real estate.

But sometimes I think to the advantage of being young is that you have selective hearing. So basically they would tell me this sort of stuff, I wouldn't really listen to it, and I would just think like, oh, you know what, they're just bitter. What do they know? They don't know anything about me. I'm just gonna keep going. And I kept doing that for like two months.

And then randomly I went into this random open house in Bel Air. I think it was like a four and a half million dollar home, and I met this guy. He was the only one that I've ever met that was super encouraging of me going into real estate. And he just flipped it around; he said that was the perfect time for you to go into real estate.

You don't have any kids, you don't have a wife, you don't have a house, you don't have a mortgage, you don't have any payments. Now was the perfect time for you to learn; now was the best time for you to get into real estate. And by the time all of your friends are graduated from college, you're gonna have four years of work experience, and I promise you after four years, you're gonna be making over $100,000 a year.

And I was just sold. It was that little bit of encouragement that really just set me over the edge. And he gave me this offer that I will never forget, that I would have been an idiot to turn down. He said, "If you're interested in working with me, I will teach you what I know about the business and we'll split everything 50/50." And no joke, I started there like two days later working for him.

But now real estate is not something where you just, you go in and you know you sit down in your office and clients are fed to you. Real estate is one of these businesses where you go into the office and then you sit there and you're like, now what? Because it's all on you. Now at the time, I think I had maybe five grand saved up in my checking account. That was all I was worth at the time, about five grand; that was from me working several years over at this marine aquarium wholesaler, me saving up you know what I could over summers and spring breaks from working part-time and ditching school.

And all that was basically what I had was about five grand. That was enough to pay my way through all the real estate licensing, all the realtor fees, and like MLS fees like any little, you know, signs and business cards, everything like that. That was enough to pay for all of that and still have a bit of a cushion left over.

Now from there I wanted to start getting business. Now even though I had this guy to learn from and he was, you know, definitely encouraging me, it was really up to me to start the ball rolling. So I found this weird niche that I came across and it was basically I was seeing a lot of agents didn't care about lease clients or lease listings, but I cared about lease listings.

Because for most agents if they make five hundred dollars on a deal, it's not even worth it to them because there's, you know, some 40-year old with all these expenses and for them to be running around for like five hundred bucks wasn't worth it. But for me at eighteen, five hundred dollars was a ton of money, so I was just like, I will do whatever it takes.

And I noticed a lot of these agents just wouldn't have good photography on their lease listings, so I go to other agents in my office and say, listen, I see you had this lease listing, how about this? I will go and take pictures of your listing. I have a great camera, I know how to Photoshop them, I'll make it look amazing, and I'll give you these pictures in exchange for that.

All I ask is that you let me post your lease on Craigslist to get it some more exposure. If you lease it on your own, those pictures are yours, you don't owe me a dime, but if I lease it, I can represent the tenant. And this was a win-win for both people involved because for me it got me exposure on Craigslist to get calls from tenants and maybe find them a rental or lease that place.

And for them, they got free, great real estate photography of their listing. And I did this over and over and over and over again and I ended up getting like 12 lease listings from my office that I can post on Craigslist and I started getting a lot of calls. I started doing a lot of leasing from this and it was like, you know, $500 bucks here and sometimes like $300 bucks there and $1,000 here and $700 bucks there. It really started to pick up and I did this for about nine months, and in those nine months, I probably made about $35,000.

Now keep in mind when you're 18 years old, this to me was more money than I had ever seen in my life, and I was saving all of it because I just naturally the type where I spend err—I don't like spending a lot of money, I like saving it instead. So basically everything I just saved it and saved it and saved it. But I had yet to sell a house and that was one of the big ones for me was actually selling a house.

Because so many people were telling me who was gonna trust you at 18 years old to go and sell a house? Nobody's gonna trust you. That's the biggest investment people are gonna make of their life; why would they go and trust an 18 year old? But what happened was about 10 months in, I was sitting in an open house and a couple walks in.

Now keep in mind at this time I had sat open houses every single Sunday since I first started. Every single Sunday I'd hold an open house. I didn't get any results from it, but 10 months into it, a random couple walks in and we ended up hitting it off and they basically gave me the chance to help them find a home.

Now I think I reminded the buyer of himself when he was younger and I think someone had given him a chance when he was younger and he was somewhat repaying me with that chance. And I ended up finding him a home about a month later. It was close to three point six million dollars in Beverly Hills, and we closed on it.

Now keep in mind that commission that I made off three point six million dollars was more money than I had ever seen in my life. That was basically the equivalent of me winning the lottery. I mean that's really how I felt. And I remember having that commission and depositing that in the bank account and realized I'm like, you know what, I can never go to college after this. Like why would I go and waste time in school when I just made this huge commission?

And I'm showing my parents like, "Mom, Dad, I just made this commission, this is real. This is an actual career; I can really do this. Let's not go to college, let me do this another year and continue to recreate this." And when I got that commission, by the way, I did what any, you know, 18 almost 19-year old would do at the time, and I went and I bought my dream car at the time, which is a 2006 chrome Orange Lotus Elise.

I bought the Lotus Elise. I had money left over in the bank and I thought, you know what, I made it. But you realize that you just, you end up really liking it, that it's so much fun to do the deal, that you're meeting some great people, and best of all, it's just like I finally realized that I can actually do it and that I actually have what it takes to sell a home.

And then everyone else that was telling me I was too young, that I didn't have what it takes, that I was too inexperienced, was wrong. They were all wrong. That I just proved everyone else wrong that told me that I couldn't do it and that was the best feeling I could have ever had, the best experience I could have ever had because that gave me the confidence to tell me I can do it again.

If I can do it once, I can do it again. And not even like two months later, I sold another home for about 1.2 million dollars also in Beverly Hills. And then a few months later I sold another home for close to two million dollars, and it was just the initial confidence of that first deal that showed me that, you know what, it's actually possible and I can actually do it.

Now I was doing that, and by the third year of me selling real estate, I was hitting over $100,000 per year and I was saving pretty much all of it. Like I was living off $5 Subway sandwiches. I was basically at that time just hoarding money. I was, besides the car, like the Lotus Elise was the one thing that I had really spent money on; besides that, I would go out of my way to try to save money.

And a lot of that came from, you know, when I was 16 years old, both of my parents filed for bankruptcy around the same time. And I remember having 20 bucks and really making that $20 last, and I remember thinking that was $10 of gas and two five-dollar footlongs sandwiches, and I would make that last. I could make a $5 Subway sandwich last like lunch and dinner.

So I had that same thing going on in the back of my head that even though I'd be making like 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 dollar commissions, that in the back of my mind, I'm thinking that's a lot of Subway sandwiches and that's a lot of gas money. It never occurred to me that 70,000 was 70,000. I didn't view it as that. I thought that was gas money in Subway sandwiches, and that impact stayed with me even now.

Like even today, I still think of a lot of money that I make in terms of gas money and Subway sandwiches. That ever left. I think that made such an impression on me, I just continued saving and saving and saving. Now in 2011, I noticed real estate prices be really, really cheap and I thought that there's no way that real estate could be this cheap for this long, and I started focusing on an area in San Bernardino that I thought was just massively undervalued.

Now at the time I had close to $200,000 saved up. Now keep in mind this is about three and a half to four years in of real estate. Now also keep in mind this is me earning over $100,000 per year, which keep in mind after taxes—and California taxes are crazy, by the way—so I had about two hundred and something thousand dollars that was saved at by the time I was about 21 years old.

And I noticed real estate was so cheap in 2011 and what I did is I figured I should buy some rental property. And the reason why I thought that was because real estate for me, even though I was making decent money at it, it was pretty inconsistent. And I felt very uneasy knowing that I'm only as good as my last deal, and so even though you might make a $50,000 commission, it could be six months before you make another one of those.

And it was that inconsistency that really made me feel nervous knowing that I don't know when my next paycheck is gonna be and I don't know how much that paycheck is going to be for. And I figured, you know what, I can buy a property and just rent it out. These are properties, by the way, in San Bernardino that were selling like two hundred and fifty, sometimes two, three hundred fifty thousand dollars that were now selling for 60, 70 grand.

So I thought there's no possible way it would stay at this price. They have to at least come back up to whatever the replacement value was, which at the time was about a hundred and seventy to two hundred thousand dollars. So I figured at the very least I'm buying it basically at a third of what it was worth. So I bought my first house for $60,000 and I bought these places, by the way, all cash because these were all short sales, foreclosures, and the banks didn't want to deal with properties that, you know, had a loan contingency on them.

They wanted cash deals. But I ended up getting three properties, and I ended up renting them all out and that rental income when I was fully done with that pretty much paid the base of my living expenses. So I kept my living expenses basically whatever the properties were generating, which I think at the time was about three thousand dollars per month from these properties.

So I kept my expenses based off the three thousand dollars per month and continued just saving up what I made as a real estate agent. So now it's about 2013, and what I started noticing is a lot of my lease clients that I at least two years ago wanted to all of a sudden start buying. So maybe I made a $500 commission in 2009, well then they came to me and then bought a one and a half million dollar house. There's a thirty thousand dollar commission right there.

I've had many of those. I would say maybe about one in five, maybe one in six lease clients ended up buying something from me, and that equated to a ton of sales. From 2013 on, my sales volume just skyrocketed because a lot of these people ended up buying homes and not only that, they ended up referring me other business. And the business just continued to get better and better and better, and every year since starting I've done better than the year prior.

Now at the time, I learned in about 2013 what a Roth IRA was and what a 401k was. Now we had all this extra money coming in and I figured, you know what, I'm just gonna max out everything I can. So you know you got the 401k and the Roth IRA, so I started putting money in that in an S&P 500 index fund which, as we know, in 2013 again, that was something that just went up considerably since then.

And the values of my properties, by the way, really started going up as well. So then I just continued saving and saving and saving and saving, and my business just continued to get better and better and better. And a lot of that at the time was really just from repeat clients and referral business that just kept snowballing and building and building and building.

Then in early 2016, I saw massive potential in areas close by Marina del Rey and Venice here in California. Now again, I had been saving up pretty much all of my money over a few years of earning, you know, I won't say exactly how much—it's in the six figures—saving up this money. And I saw massive potential in these areas around Venice and Marina del Rey that were seeing a lot of this tech boom, and I saw a lot of the money moving further east.

Well, I ended up buying a house there and renovating it. Now that house I bought for, you know, close to 800, it's now worth about 1.2, and then I continued saving, and the business continued to get better and better and better in terms of real estate. Then I bought a duplex this year that I've been renovated. I'm in at about 650, and the value of it is now worth about 850, so that's another two hundred thousand dollars in equity that I made on this.

So from doing all of this, now keep in mind this is nine years in and I won't say my exact net worth, but I will say that by the age of 26, I was worth over a million dollars. That's exactly how I did it from start to finish. And then as far as the future and you know what else I want to do from here, I could never see myself giving up real estate sales.

Like I love being a real estate agent; for me, that is one of the funnest jobs in the world. I absolutely love it; like I would just be bored if I wasn't doing real estate sales. You know, in the future, I eventually might want to transition a little bit more towards the investment side; it's just very expensive.

So like I have to continue to make money to, you know, funnel that into buying more property, so that that won't go anywhere. But as of now, like I can't give up being a real estate agent just because that to me is everything to me and I absolutely love it, and thankfully it all worked out in the end.

You know, sometimes what you think is going to be a negative in your life actually turns out to be a positive. In every step of the way until you take a step back, you can't really see the impact one little thing has on you. So also, if you're going through any tough times and you think your life is in this year or whatever, sometimes all it takes is for you to take a step back and realize that those things all happen for a reason and will help shape you into the person who you know you're eventually going to become, which is going to be a better person and happier and all this sort of other stuff.

So anyway, that's exactly how I did it. Hopefully, I didn't leave anything out, but if you have any questions, any—any Graeme didn't mention this—just comment down below. I'm happy to answer anything. If you guys enjoy this video, by the way, please click the like button; it really helps the channel, it helps out boost engagement and stuff like that.

Something as simple as clicking a like button really does make a huge difference. It lets me know that you guys like this sort of content; it helps out with engagement, I—it really helps in every aspect. So something as simple as that, like if you wouldn't mind smashing the like button if you guys enjoyed this, that would mean a lot. If you made it all the way through, and you want to comment down below, I spend hours responding to all the comments that have made it all the way through just because that means a lot to me that you guys watch all the way through and you guys enjoy this. And people that watch it all the way through I believe are like the true MVPs of the channel and definitely deserve some support on that as well.

Well, anyway, thank you again for watching. Many more videos to come, and until next time.