Forget the swanky corner office with a view to infinity, latest generation iPad or Blackberry, and even the customer list you stole from the boss; all these investments pale in comparison to an investment dedicated to improving the gray matter in your skull. In other words, get yourself a world class knowledge base and use it to leverage your income into the stratosphere.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, we believe that the Accredited Income Property Investment Specialist (AIPIS) is, hands down, the single most important investment a realtor can make. How many real estate professionals do you know that make serious money? Likely a few but only a few. How many do you know who work long, hard hours scrabbling to earn enough to pay the bills, and find themselves considering part-time employment in other fields to survive a local market downturn? There are probably a lot more realtors who fall into this category.

If you’re an inside-the-box thinker who keeps his nose to the grindstone and rarely raises his eyes to scan the horizon for opportunity, and who thinks that working harder trumps smarter every time, well, we might have a tougher time convincing you that the stuff that used to work might not work now.

To be blunt, the industry has changed and you don’t want to be a young, old-timer clinging to bygone strategies. We’ve said it before but here it is again – you must rip yourself free of continually pursuing the predictable, safe and, only rarely profitable, home buyer. What you want is to tap into the investor market and that’s what the AIPIS real estate course teaches you to do. Whether you choose to put this knowledge to work cultivating a different group of clients, or hoard it for yourself to use building your own income property portfolio, an AIPIS accreditation is the means to an end.

Using single family residential (SFR) homes as an investment is an unparallelled wealth building strategy (unless you plan on inventing the next generation of Internet or pet rock) that allows you to bypass the increasing chaos and lack of profitable returns in the stock market. Don’t let an edifice of ignorance be your financial undoing. We say to you, “Mr. Realtor, tear down that wall!”

The AIPIS Team

Flickr / Giuseppe Bognanni