Earn the High Income You Dream of with a New Career in Real Estate

Our apartment locators achieve success every day at AptAmigo. To uncover the secrets behind their accomplishments, we interviewed some of our best and brightest to help you make informed decisions about your career, whether you’re considering real estate for the first time, or are a seasoned professional. First up, learn about Ryan Ledoda’s journey to prosperity as he tells it.

How Ryan Ledoda Made His Real Estate Dream a Reality

What did you do before you came to AptAmigo?

I was in the Navy for a few years before going to college. While there, I learned a lot about leadership, worked with people from a variety of backgrounds, and got really good at working all hours of the day. 

After college, I started at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, making my way through their management training program. I call it “my MBA without the IOU.” I gained skills there that I have fallen back on consistently throughout my career, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. In this retail setting, I took care of people who had just been in a car accident, while also selling them something they needed to get through that tough experience. I learned how to manage people and retain top talent, helping them reach their goals so that I could reach mine. I learned how to manage a P&L (profit & loss statement) and turn depreciating assets into a huge paycheck for myself.

For the last several years before joining AptAmigo, I floated around the flexible office branch of commercial real estate. While working at Industrious for about 5 years, I wore a lot of different hats, launching a bunch of their locations around the Midwest, helping to build and facilitate their sales training program, selling a lot of offices all over the country to businesses of all sizes, and working with a ton of incredible people. After Industrious, I jumped into consulting at Colliers, then over to the tech side of the industry at Valve to help build a global distribution system and sales tool for flexible office space operators all over the world. Both were great experiences that forced me to zoom out, think bigger picture, work in a global capacity, and create a product that people don’t know they need yet.

Overall, I’ve been really fortunate throughout my career to work with insanely smart and talented people who are always willing to let me listen in and learn from them.  

Why apartment locating and why now?

If I’m being honest, I had never heard of apartment locating before my exposure to AptAmigo. I had known for a while that I wanted to make the jump to the residential side of real estate. In fact, the first time I started a licensing course was in 2018. When I thought about becoming a real estate agent though, all I thought about was buy/sell. Whether that meant single-family homes, condos, or multifamily investment properties, buy/sell was always the only option in my brain. 

BUT. The more I learned, the more apartment locating felt like the right entry point into residential real estate for me. Renting an apartment is way more accessible than buying a home because the economy isn’t in the best place, and I live in a city filled with beautiful apartments and a ton of people who move here every year. Also, the sales cycle is way faster. I would compare buy/sell to enterprise sales (large sales to large companies) and apartment locating to SMB sales (or sales to small-to-medium-sized businesses) – the SMB side is much more my speed. 

The “why now?” question is the more complex one for me to answer. I interviewed with AptAmigo a few different times over the last couple of years before finally making the leap. For me, it boiled down to a few things: 

1. Time isn’t slowing down. The timing was never going to be “right.” If I was ever actually going to get into real estate, I was going to have to take a leap at some point. The old clichè, “there’s no time like the present,” hit hard.
2. I was hungry to learn something new. I loved the industry I was in, but felt strongly that I needed a big change to really feel challenged and excited about work again. 
3. I was desperate to multiply my paycheck. My wife and I bought our first home (a real fixer-upper) last year. We learned quickly that everything costs at least twice as much as you think it will. I didn’t want to spend the next several years pinching pennies and/or not doing the renovations the way we want to do them. Any promotion or new job within the area I already worked in wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go as fast as I wanted to get there. 

What about AptAmigo appealed to you?

I’m not from Chicago. I moved down here right before the pandemic hit, and I’m a homebody, so if you asked me to draw you a map of Chicago with the different neighborhoods on it, I would fail miserably. But, in order to be successful at anything, you need to become an expert, and I knew that if I was going to become one in Chicago real estate, I would need a lot of help.

My decision to join this team came down to the resources available to me at AptAmigo – the training and onboarding program that we go through, the way our software dummy proofs finding the best possible places for my clients, the operations and biz dev teams we rely on so that I can be as efficient as possible, and the people in the office on a daily basis who help me navigate the questions I have no idea how to answer. I knew that I was going to need ALL OF IT to be as successful as I wanted to be. 

What’s your favorite part about this job?

This one is easy. It’s the people – both my clients and coworkers. Consistent human interaction is something that I lost as a remote employee for the last couple of years. I really enjoy being in the office and physically seeing people every day. I love knowing that each day I will converse with a diverse group of people, and hopefully, somewhere in that process I will make someone’s life easier and better by hunting down their dream apartment for them. 

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in apartment locating?

There are three things I would tell anyone who’s thinking about doing this: 

• If you want to build a career in real estate, don’t wait for the perfect time to make the jump; it’ll never come. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll achieve what you want to achieve. 
• If you’re going to do this, do it all the way. Make this your career, not your side hustle. If you treat anything like a part-time job, you’re going to get part-time results, and this is truly a job that you get out what you put in. 
• Set yourself up financially to go 3+ months without any income. As referenced in my previous point, you have to be all in with this job to get the most out of it. Money is a huge stressor and that stress leads to distraction, which can cause you to question if this was the right move. And for some people, it may push you to take on a side job, or even leave the field altogether prematurely. There is an upfront investment of time here, and the payout is delayed compared to your typical 9-5, but that payout will be far more gratifying than any money you’ve earned in your life to this point.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in this job, and how did you overcome it?

I found myself riding an emotional roller coaster a TON early on. When a deal closed, I was on top of the world. When the deal I did everything right on didn’t close, I questioned everything I was doing. I don’t think that will ever be something I 100% overcome. I’m an emotional person, and being as bought into each of my clients as I am is my biggest strength and my biggest weakness in this job. 

So how do I overcome the roller coaster? It’s going to be a journey for me, I think. I’m going to nerd out for a second, apologies. There’s a theory called loss aversion based on the idea that losses hurt twice as much as wins feel good, and it’s backed by a number of studies. Think about how you would feel if you randomly found $100 on the sidewalk today. Now, think about how you would feel if, when you went to deposit that $100, the man at the bank told you they had been hacked and you lost $50. All I’m trying to do right now is remember to count my wins as much as I count my losses. Eventually, I’m hoping to count the losses less than the wins, and maybe someday let the losses roll right off of my shoulders painlessly and only count my wins.

Describe your biggest accomplishment since beginning this position, or a time when you felt really successful. What did that experience mean to you?

I closed five deals in my first five days. There was definitely an element of luck, but it was very early confirmation for me that I made the right decision in coming to AptAmigo. I was not yet an expert, but I had the support I needed to act as one for my clients. It was awesome to be able to lean on the skills I had developed over the years in different fields and translate them into success in a brand new to me endeavor. More than that though, it was the reaction I got from my peers on the team – everyone was fired up for me, told me it felt like I had been here forever, and they were excited to have me there. 

Joining a new team, in a commission-only role, is a huge risk. I’ve been a part of sales cultures that are very dog-eat-dog, where someone else’s success comes at the cost of my own, and that’s not something I’m interested in being a part of ever again in my life. I have had the exact opposite experience here – we all support each other, cheer each other on, and are quick to share anything that might help make someone else successful – that’s what has meant the most to me so far. 

Related: Advice for Apartment Locators, from Apartment Locators