Salary
Average Salary: $80,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $3,339,840
If you get started in this field early on, you should be sitting comfortably in the upper middle class by the midpoint of your career. If not sooner. Yearly salaries in real estate development range from $50,000-$60,000 per year for a starting gig to $80,000-$120,000 for an experienced worker bee (source).
It takes a certain amount of creative vision and inspiration to do well as a real estate developer; you have to have a good idea of what people want, because the profession comes down to making land valuable to people. The more people who want to live on, shop at, or visit your land, the more it's worth. Simple, right?
Well, if that part is simple, then good—because there's also some math involved. Say, for example, that independent developer Jim Jimbles purchases a defunct cupcake shop in a so-so neighborhood at $100 per square foot. The cupcake shop is a thousand square feet, so Jimbo spends $100,000 on the property.
In fixing it up and listing it for resale, Jimbo spent another $30,000 and about a month of his time. That means if Jimbo wants to break even (not including a wage for the time spent), he has to sell the property for $130 per square foot.
And if Jimbo wants to actually profit off the whole endeavor, he has to shoot for something like $150 per square foot―and that's only a profit of $20,000 on the whole affair, minus other expenses which accumulate quickly. Jimbo knows that if he just breaks even on every property, he'll be broke in no time.
That scenario also skips the factoring in of Jimbo's bank roll, taxes, and commissions. Rest assured, though, all of that makes the process much more complicated. Also, most potential properties aren't listed at nice round figures like 1000 square feet at $100 per. As a real estate developer, you're in charge of all that math and it determines your salary, so you'll need to be adept at those sorts of calculations.