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When the average person hears “side hustle,” they think of average gig work like driving Ubers. But you’re not average, and you can earn far more than the average gig work pays. Consider these real estate side hustles that can generate $100,000 or more in extra annual income to potentially help you ditch your day job.
1. Real Estate Photography
Professional real estate photographers charge anywhere from $150-$500 or more to shoot homes. They can earn even more by including aerial drone shots or virtually staging the photos after shooting.
By doing even a few shoots a week, you could earn an extra $50,000-$100,000 each year. And if you also invest in real estate, the skills of professional home photography will help you sell or lease properties faster and at higher price points.
2. Flipping Mobile Homes
When people think about flipping real estate, they immediately jump to flipping houses. There’s certainly been no shortage of TV shows about it.
But nobody’s shooting TV shows about flipping mobile homes, which is precisely what makes it so lucrative.
“Flipping mobile homes has become my favorite niche in real estate,” Cody Dover, owner of Little Rock Property Buyers, tells BiggerPockets. “The entry cost is so much lower than traditional homes, and the margins are just as good, if not better. I’ve bought mobile homes for as little as $10,000, put $5,000 into them, and resold them for $30,000 or more. It’s a space where there’s real demand but way less competition.”
3. Flipping Houses
If flipping mobile homes is too unsexy for you, you can stick with the tried-and-true side hustle of flipping houses. Flippers can easily make $30,000-$100,000 on a single flip and do several in a year with the same working capital.
“I started flipping and wholesaling houses in my early 20s just to make some extra money,” my friend Austin Glanzer at 717HomeBuyers told BiggerPockets. “I didn’t have a big budget or fancy tools—just a willingness to knock on doors and make offers. The key is finding properties in any market that have good fundamentals and solving the seller’s problem quickly. Even now that I’m full-time, I tell people this is one of the best ways to build wealth if you’re willing to put in the work.”
In fact, my co-investing club has partnered with house flippers to invest passively in flips. As an investment club, we provided the funds, and the flippers then went and flipped as many houses as they could with it, over an 18-month period.
4. Flipping Land
The co-investing club has also invested with land flipping companies, with excellent results.
Like flipping mobile homes, flipping land isn’t sexy. This is precisely why it generates such high returns.
For example, last year, we invested in a land flipping fund that pays out a 16% annualized distribution every quarter. They buy parcels for 30 to 60 cents on the dollar and split it into two to five buildable parcels to resell. Their average hold time is around four months.
A few months ago, we partnered with a land-flipping company with a different niche strategy. They buy parcels, install a manufactured home on the lot, and then sell retail to first-time homebuyers. In the market where they operate, they sell these homes for 50% of the average home price. That creates recession resilience, as there’s always demand for affordable starter homes.
5. Real Estate Wholesaling
A famous real estate hustle, wholesaling involves putting a property under contract for a deep discount, then flipping the contract to another investor for a finder’s fee.
For example, say you find a distressed seller with a fixer-upper worth $200,000 as-is. You put it under contract for $160,000 and then offer the contract to a flipper for $170,000. You make a tidy $10,000 as the deal finder, and you never have to take out a loan or swing a hammer.
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Tyler Vinsand at 757 Property Solutions started out wholesaling on the side of a full-time job. “The great thing about this side hustle is you don’t need cash or credit to get started,” he told BiggerPockets. “You’re essentially connecting motivated sellers with investors and getting paid for solving their problems.
“I was closing five-figure deals just by making phone calls and driving for dollars on weekends,” Vinsand added. “Once I got consistent, it turned into a legitimate six-figure income stream.”
It should be noted, however, that wholesaling has become a controversial practice, and some states have taken legislative action against it, so be sure to keep up with the laws in your state.
6. Owning Short-Term Rentals
By this point, everyone and their mother understands the short-term rental Airbnb strategy. Yet, in many markets, it remains far more lucrative than renting to long-term tenants. That proves especially true in markets with abundant tourism or with tenant-friendly laws that make landlording onerous and risky.
I have a friend in tenant-friendly Baltimore who rents short-term rentals. He managed to get in before the hotel lobby threw enough money at the city government to get them to ban Airbnbs, with only the tiniest loopholes for exceptions. Today, he earns thousands of dollars each month in net cash flow from just two properties, partially because he has so little competition.
In fact, the featured deal we’re vetting together at the co-investing club this month is a boutique hotel in a market that banned Airbnbs. The operator, similar to my friend in Baltimore, got grandfathered in for his existing portfolio in this area. And he’s effectively cornering the market by buying the only commercially zoned hospitality property in a 30-mile radius.
7. Managing Short-Term Rentals
Of course, no one says you have to buy in order to earn money from short-term rentals.
You could start a property management service specializing in short-term rentals. Because they require more labor, Airbnb managers can command significantly higher fees. Think 15% to 40% of the gross rental income, as opposed to 7% to 10%. Most of that labor you can outsource to maids or marketing VAs for minimal hands-on labor yourself.
8. Subleasing Flexible Office Space
It’s been a difficult five years for traditional office buildings trying to lease tens of thousands of square feet at a time. But the rise of remote work has created plenty of demand for flexible office space and coworking. I’m literally writing these words from a coworking space in Lima, Peru.
Some entrepreneurs have taken the arbitrage model to heart for office space. “I started by leasing a few private offices and renting them out individually,” Tom Troccoli of Regency Executive Suites told BiggerPockets. “With the rise of remote work and small business startups, there’s a real demand for short-term, professional space. Just a few rooms in the right area can easily generate $5,000 to $10,000 per month in recurring income if you offer flexibility and keep overhead low. It’s one of the most underrated real estate plays out there.”
From Side Hustle to Financial Freedom
To this day, I work a side hustle as a freelance writer. It started when an unscrupulous web developer ran off with half of my seed capital for our co-investing club, and my partner and I ran out of money before it became profitable. But I discovered that I enjoy freelance writing, and continued doing it long after the club became profitable.
That extra income freed me to take greater risks in both my business and in my investments. Long before I became an expert on passive real estate investing, speaking on the podcast circuit, I experimented with my own money in it. I made mistakes, some of which proved expensive. Today, I organize an investment club with almost 350 members, which meets every month to vet passive investments together.
Your path will look different, of course. But building side hustles can help you reach financial freedom faster, not just from the extra income but also by helping you build high-value skills and potentially quit your day job to go full-time as an entrepreneur.
See you on the other side, my friend.
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