Today we’re counting down the top 10 weirdest ways to make money in real estate.

Here are the criteria for our list:

1. The way to make money must be at least real estate adjacent
2. You should be able to make a reasonable amount of money (more than a few bucks per month)
3. And it should be something most agents aren’t doing…something on the weird side.

Top 10 Weird Ways to Make Money in Real Estate

Let’s count ’em down!

10. New Home Photo Shoots

We’re kicking off our list of the top 10 weird ways to make money in real estate with a semi-normal-but-seriously-under-served market: new home photo shoots.

You’ve seen engagement photos, pregnancy photos, and new baby photos. You may or may not have seen new home photos…

In the age of Instagram, new homeowners want to mark the milestone with a professional photo shoot of themselves in the home. And for good reason; this is a HUGE life event!

New home photos are a perfect way to announce via social media that they are now proud homeowners. These photos are also ideal for housewarming party invitations.

But here’s why real estate agents should offer new home photo shoots: free publicity!

Just ask your clients to tag you in their online posts. Ta-da! Not only are you making some side money from the photo shoots, you’re also spreading the word about your real estate practice!

By the way, if you don’t have the time or skill to handle this on your own, partner with a professional photographer. You get some of the publicity and a share of the income, without actually taking the photos yourself.

Learn more at How to Make Money with New Home Photo Shoots.

9. Hard Money Loans

Hard money loans make our list of weird ways to make money in real estate because they require a person with a certain risk tolerance level.

If you have a higher tolerance for risk, hard money loans might be a good fit for you.

You may be familiar with real estate note investing, in which you act like the bank, lending money to home buyers who may not qualify for traditional mortgage financing. Hard money loans are somewhat similar, but instead of financing long-term home loans, you’d be financing short-term real estate loans. In this case, you’re not going to carry the note on a 15 or 30-year mortgage; you’re going to require payment in full within the next 6-24 months.

Hard money loans might be used to fund a flip. Maybe you have a flipper with a cash flow problem; the market’s prime for flipping, but the flipper doesn’t have the cash to finance the renovation, and doesn’t qualify for a traditional bank loan. You could issue a hard money loan to the flipper for the cost of the renovation at a whopping 10-15% interest rate. When the property sells, the flipper makes a tidy profit, and you earn exceptional returns.

Obviously there are lots of ways this can go wrong. If the flipper fails spectacularly, the property will likely revert to the bank. You, as the hard money lender, have few reassurances of repayment.

Private Money Lending Learn How to Consistently Generate a Passive Income Stream by Gustavo Gomez isn’t about real estate specifically, but it’s a solid overview of hard money lending in any industry. It’s worth a read if you’re considering hard money lending.

8. Estate Sales

You’ve probably been to an estate sale or two in your time.

Not a yard sale where you are limited to the items displayed on the seller’s lawn, but a full estate sale where the home is open to the public and everything from the furnishings to the linens to the spices in the cabinets are for sale.

Estate sales are necessary when homeowners pass away, move into assisted living, or move in with their grown children. The family will remove all items not-for-sale from the premises, then an estate sale company will come in and sell everything that’s not permanently fixed to the property. The estate sale company will price everything (often grouping things for easy pricing changes as the sale dwindles – “anything with a green sticker is just $10” easily becomes “anything with a green sticker is just $2” by the final day of the sale). They’ll also take care of any required set up as well as the complete tear-down, which includes removing all unsold items from the property. Unsold items may become the property of the estate sale company or may be donated, depending on the terms of the contract.

Consider making estate sales one of your weird ways to make money in real estate.

In exchange for your hard work on the estate sale, you’ll receive a commission on all proceeds. Plus you’ll be able to cross-promote your estate sales business and your real estate sales businesses. People requiring an estate sale are most likely selling the home, so you could earn a substantial amount of money on a single property.

You could build your whole niche around this target market!

Estate Sales Warning

This income stream can be lucrative, but there are a few warnings before you jump in:

• Estate sales typically take place on spring and summer weekends. This poses an obvious problem for real estate professionals who should be showing homes during this time. The solution? Partner or outsource. You can have a business partner to take care of the day-to-day operations of the estate sales business. Or think like a business owner and hire a manager to handle that.
• Not every house is a gold mine. You might invest a lot of time on one sale and not make much money. The good news is that your estate sale business could provide a competitive advantage during your listing presentation, so agreeing to take on a less-than-perfect estate sale could win you a listing.

Estate sales are a lot of work, so this side hustle is best suited to the highly ambitious real-estate-empire-builders.

7. Residuals

Some real estate firms, notably eXp Realty, offer residuals to agents who bring in other agents. If you bring another agent into your firm, you make a small cut on all the business that new agent brings to the firm.

You’re basically just getting paid to connect people. Even better, you’re getting paid to help other agents succeed.

This is becoming more common, but to many agents, it sounds like a pyramid scheme, which makes it weird enough for our list of weird ways to make money in real estate.

6. Tools and Equipment Rental

If you’ve worked with first-time homeowners, you know they usually buy a starter home requiring some fixes, and they don’t have the money (or need, really) to buy expensive DIY equipment, so they head to Home Depot and rent it.

Why not offer to rent your tools and equipment to them? In my experience, the rentals at Home Depot are often in poor condition, too expensive, and sometimes not even available for weeks at a time. You can provide a better rental experience!

Just for the love of God, make sure you get their credit card on file for a healthy deposit in case they somehow destroy your equipment.

Learn more: How to Make Money Renting Out Tools and Equipment.

5. Wholesaling

Wholesaling is like flipping, except without actually owning a property…

Rather than buying the property, then selling to a new buyer, wholesalers get a deal under contract, then sell the contract to another investor for more than you originally agreed to pay. And you pocket the difference. So it’s like flipping the purchase contract instead of flipping the property.

This is quick money (even quicker than fix-and-flips), plus you never have to get your hands dirty. And you can get started for just the cost of the earnest money deposit.

Sound too good to be true?

You’re right to be skeptical. There are a few downsides to wholesaling:

• Great deals don’t come along every day. You’ll invest a lot of time in finding deals to wholesale.
• If your buyer bails, you’re left on the hook for the property. This means buying the property yourself or forfeiting your earnest money deposit.
• Profit margins aren’t terribly high. Although they don’t really need to be since the deals are quick and (hopefully!) easy to facilitate.

Wholesaling is largely about relationships. You need an “in” with potential sellers and with investors to buy. And you need to trust that your sellers and buyers will close the deal as expected.

If you want to learn more about ways to invest in real estate through wholesaling, check out If You Can’t Wholesale After This: I’ve Got Nothing For You… by Todd M. Fleming.

4. Selling Digital Products

“Digital products” covers a pretty wide range, so consider this a broad overview.

You could make money selling real estate-related digital products like:

• eBooks
• online courses
• stock photos

But that’s certainly not all…

You could also create templates, design elements, printable wall art, calendars, mailers…use your imagination!

Etsy is a great place to get ideas for digital products that are selling. It’s also a great platform from which to start selling your digital products once they’re ready to hit the market. Transaction fees are minimal: just a $0.20 listing fee per item (which will cover the listing for 4 months) + a 5% transaction fee for each sale (that’s 5% of the price + any shipping).

Here are just a few genius ideas from Etsy that would be a great fit for real estate agents:

• Landlord helpers (lease agreement templates, renewals, move-in/move-out inspection sheets, etc)
• Change of address printable postcards
• Kids game printables (after all, you’re an expert in keeping kids busy so parents can focus on the home, right?)

In fact, we recently launched Key Real Estate Designs on Etsy to sell resources for real estate agents (like social media calendars, business planners, and even blog content!), and so far we’re loving this weird way to make money!

3. Blogging

As a real estate agent, you should be blogging. The main reasons for blogging are to:

• Grow your online presence so buyers and sellers can find you online. It’s a killer prospecting strategy so you never have to door-knock or cold-call again!
• Demonstrate your knowledge and authority.
• Build a relationship with your followers so you’re always top of mind for business and referrals.

So why is blogging on our list of weird ways to make money in real estate?

Because almost no one in real estate knows how to monetize their blog!

There are 3 primary ways to make some passive income from the real estate blog you’re already publishing:

1. Affiliate links
2. Sponsored posts
3. Ads

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are simply links on your blog, podcast, or YouTube Channel that help your audience get to a useful product or service. Think of them as automated referrals.

Here are the basics of affiliate links work:

• You apply to be an approved affiliate marketer with multiple affiliate programs (like Amazon.com affiliates for example).
• Once approved, you can generate custom links to your affiliates’ products and services.
• You insert these links into your blog where appropriate. If you’re writing a post on home-staging for example, you can link to a bunch of Amazon home decor products that would help with staging.
• When a reader clicks on your link and buys a product through your affiliate, you receive a small commission.

I love affiliate links for real estate blogs because they are so flexible. Amazon is one of the easiest affiliate programs to join, and they have almost everything your audience could need or want.

Writing a post about staging a home to sell? Include links to Amazon household items that will help. Writing a post for first time homeowners? Include a link to a quality tool kit because you know they’re going to need one!

And these links are a win, win, win. Your audience gets easy access to a useful product, you earn a commission, and the vendor makes a sale. Everyone wins!

Want more affiliate info? Check out The Top 5 Affiliate Networks for Real Estate Agents.

Ads

Ads are another option for monetizing your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel.

We use ads on this site because we provide 99% of our content for free, and the ads generate enough money to allow us to continue providing free content.

But be careful using ads on your real estate content. If the primary goal of your content is to drive new leads, let your audience focus on that, and don’t distract them with ads. But if you’re posting a piece of content purely to be helpful (useful homeowner tips or information about local events, for example), an ad might be appropriate.

You could use Google Ads (the quickest and easiest way I’ve found to add ads to your site), and get paid every time someone clicks on your ads. Or you can sell ad space to local businesses for a flat fee.

For more info, read How Do I Publish Ads on My Website?.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is when someone pays you to create content that promotes their brand.

You see this a lot on food blogs. In the recipe, the blogger will recommend a specific brand of BBQ sauce, orange juice, refrigerated dough, or whatever. They’ll explain why that brand works better in the recipe than other brands, and they’ll tell you where to buy that brand. Most likely, that brand is paying for that post (although smart bloggers will only accept sponsored content they truly believe because doing otherwise will come back to bite you!).

If you’re creating a video for homeowners about how to change a light fixture, maybe your favorite electrician would like to sponsor the post. They would pay for you to say something about how “So-and-So Electrical is just a phone call away if you have any trouble.”

Prices for sponsored posts largely depend on how many viewers your posts typically get. If you’re fairly new, $20 is a good starting point. Once you have a large following, you can easily command hundreds for a sponsored post. And all for a post you were going to publish just to be helpful to your viewers and grow your online presence!

2. Guiding Local Experiences

Guiding local experiences is probably the single most fun item on our list of weird ways to make money in real estate.

If you enjoy meeting new people from all walks of life (which I’m guessing you do!), guiding experiences might just be the perfect side hustle income stream for you! It’s just a matter of creating a unique local experience for visitors to your amazing city.

What unique experiences can you share?

Consider some of these locals-only experiences:

• cooking classes featuring local ingredients and dishes unique to your region
• dance classes with local music and style
• yoga classes in the shadow of a local landmark
• outdoor art classes with local scenery as your subject
• a weekend camping trip in your state park

Or some of these guided tours as experiences:

• hiking tours to a local landmark
• kayak tours of your local waterways
• bicycle tours through your lively neighborhoods
• walking tours of the history of your city
• photography tours of your city’s most instagramable locations
• food tours of your best local cuisine

Your options are limitless! And you can easily work in the fact that you know everything about the area because you’re a local real estate agent. Maybe even find a buyer who’s moving to the area!

With platforms like Vayable and Airbnb Experiences, it’s easier than ever to get started.

1. Property Tax Appeals

That’s right, property tax appeals lands the top spot on our list of weird ways to make money in real estate.

If you’re thinking, what the heck are property tax appeals? well, you’re not alone. In fact, I had no idea property tax appeals were a whole industry until I was actually employed as a property tax consultant!

Basically, you’re reviewing property tax bills to see if your clients are being overtaxed. If they are, you appeal the taxes to get them reduced.

Here’s are the main reasons property tax appeals tops our list:

1. Real estate pros already know how to value real estate through a comparative market analysis. And that’s the hardest part!
2. You can make pretty good income, despite investing almost no money upfront and relatively little time.
3. You’re able to boost the value for your past clients by spending just a few minutes each year to review their property taxes and let them know if they could be saving money on their property taxes. If you find an appeal opportunity for your clients, you’re basically a hero.
4. You can cross-promote your real estate services. Your property tax clients will think of you when they’re ready to sell, and your buyers could become property tax clients.
5. The opportunity for property tax appeals is greatest during a down real estate market when sales are slower anyway. So they are the perfect way to recession-proof your real estate practice.

Here’s how property tax appeals work (in a nutshell):

• Property taxes are usually based on the County Assessor’s estimation of the value of the property. But Assessors are often wrong because they apply broad value increase formulas by submarket (they can’t possibly value each property individually every year).
• If the homeowner (or their representative – that could be you!) can show the County that the actual value of the property is less than the estimated value used to calculate their taxes, the homeowner will be granted a tax reduction.
• Then you earn a commission on the amount of the tax savings.

So this really involves a simple property valuation (most states don’t even require an appraisal), which you could complete as a real estate professional, and presentation of your valuation findings to the county taxing authority. Quite often the value presentation can even be presented via email or phone call!

Learn more about this easy money in How to Make Money with Property Tax Appeals.

Do you agree with our list of weird ways to make money?

We’d love to get your thoughts on our list. What did we get right? And (more importantly!) did we miss any weird ways to make money in real estate? Let us know in the comments!