To begin with, you should know that being a real estate investing can be extremely risky business. So risky, in fact, a study commissioned in 2001 of large real estate investor associations in America found that 92% of fall first time investors drop out within 3 months. Other research has uncovered that 9 out of 10 investors do not survive the first year of their investment portfolio.

What is equally sad, is that the Small Business Administration reports that 95% of all businesses fail within their first year. Then, within 5 years, only the remaining five percent are left over.

Therefore, real estate investor attrition rates are Far HIGHER than the failure rate of small businesses!!!

However, there are a few causes – specific reasons why – such a high rate of investors fail. Much of those reasons can be addressed by gaining access to a highly regarded real estate mentoring program. Other causes, such as not have an appropriate business plan and set of step-by-step processes to following when becoming a real estate investor, can be as easy as pulling a real estate book off the shelf at your local book store, and reading through its contents.

All in all, the reasons can be argued for and against being a real estate investor. In my mind, when I looked to become a real estate investor, I jotted down a “Top 21” list of things I did (and did not) want to do, which would define me as a person and my business.

Those same twenty-one reasons are copied below for you, and are a large part of why I would argue that being a real estate investor beats any other type of career, hands down:

1. Spend just a few hours a day or week at “work”,
2. Be you own boss,
3. Wakeup when You want,
4. Not have to travel every week (I traveled extensively at the time),
5. Ability to run almost my entire business from a laptop and phone,
6. Earn an exponential income,
7. Dress how You want,
8. Live a virtually tax deductible life,
9. Do what You want, wherever You want,
10. Never be held down to a time schedule,
11. Not have to develop or ship products (e.g. online),
12. Not have to apply for a merchant account (a real hassle),
13. Not have to write-up an extensive business plan (can you say “yawn”?),
14. Have an abundance of customers wherever my business went,
15. Not have to be tied to economic cycles (where demand still increases no matter what),
16. Could generate profit anytime, anywhere, any market
17. Could get involved with little personal risk,
18. Could get started without any previous industry experience,
19. Could be my own boss,
20. Did not involve office politics,
21. And ultimately, one that focused on people helping people

I’d challenge anyone to take this “Top 21” criterion and try to apply it to any other home-based business model, franchise, networking scheme, internet marketing, hard product or service based business and have those meet all twenty-one criteria mentioned here.