Chris & John
- May 28, 2020
- 3 min read

Ep 57: The Value of Gaining Experience and Skills on Someone Else’s Dime with Chris Ford

If you are a young person or new at the real estate investment game, this episode is a must. We talk to 24-year-old Chris Ford from Mosser Capital about the choices he made along his path toward a career in real estate investing. Having had the option of going the traditional route, Chris studied at Berkeley and landed a junior internship at the firm where he still works today, and he shares how attending college gave him the firm foundation he lacked before. Not that attending a good school guarantees success: he constantly pursued mentors and experts in the field, inviting many people for coffees and networking before the right opportunity came his way. And Chris by no means advocates for the traditional route as the best or only one and insists that there are numerous points of entry into this space. Later, we get into the topic of working for someone else versus going on your own, and he outlines the many benefits of young people first seeking out the safety of another firm, including learning on someone else’s dime and being allowed to make mistakes that might have cost them too much otherwise. That is not to say that everyone should want to start their own firms. Many people prefer working for someone else and can still put the skills and experience to good use by applying what they learn to their side hustles at a much smaller scale. This episode chockfull of helpful advice—be sure to check it out!

Key Points From This Episode:

Thoughts on the idea that little has changed and deals will start popping up soon.
How Chris’s early experiences shaped his perceptions of manual labor and entrepreneurship.
Find out how learning about personal finance set him on the path of real estate investing.
Landing an internship at Mosser Capital in his senior year and building out his career there.
Why, for Chris, attending a good school was such an important part of his skills development.
The traditional versus non-traditional path and why working in corporate America might not be necessary.
Learn why networking and making connections means more than attending a top school.
The benefits of working for someone else versus on your own as a young person with no track record.
Building the foundation of your competency by learning from those who are already successful.
Applying what you learn at a small scale in a side hustle while still working for someone else.
Getting into real estate by going the brokerage route and gaining experience with sales.
How the COVID-19 crisis has impacted Chris’s real estate philosophy and risk tolerance.

Tweetables:

“You don’t have to go to a great school; certainly with multifamily, it is simple enough if you are a smart, hard worker who is willing to hit the pavement and learn investment finance skills—the hard skills I’ll just sum it up in—you don’t have to go work in corporate America for five to ten years to start your own investment firm.” — Chris Ford [0:15:09]

“I realize now that if you go work for someone for two, three, four, five years, get essentially all of the hard skills and really learn the business, not on your own dime, you’ll be able to go farther faster.” — Chris Ford [0:25:59]

“I just found that, if you actually wanted to be an entrepreneur in real estate, going the brokerage route and learning the business on the sales side is just as good a way to do that. It’s generally easier to break into brokerage than it is on the buy-side right away.” — Chris Ford [0:35:55]