5 Tips For New Investors - Which ones are you doing and which do you need to do?

[Jonathan Greene]

I respond to many posts here to help new investors, so I wanted to give out 5 tips that may help you on your journey if you are new. These are not things I came up with alone; they are things I learned from experience over 30+ years. If you do these five things consistently and immediately, you will get out of analysis paralysis and into the game much quicker than watching Instagram Reels and TikTok videos.

If you are experienced and want to weigh in on which ones here you like and dislike, let's go. Collaboration is the best part of real estate investing and I did not get this from using some AI-generated portal (currently running rampant in the forums). I know all of this stuff.

1. Go to meetups. As many as you can. Please find all of the local meetups and put them all on your calendar as repeating and go. You can read all the books and listen to all the podcasts, but until you know other real estate investors, you will not buy anything and not move forward. Find the meetups with no pitches where it's all networking or speakers with no pitch.

2. Get out from behind the computer and look at properties. The number of times I have heard a new investor tell me they evaluated 20 properties this week when they saw none is too many. You won't learn anything from crunching numbers until you know what those numbers mean in real life. You have to know what $200k smells like in your area and feels like. You don't need to have an agent (although that would be great, but it's not a good use of their time until you are pre-approved and ready) because there are Open Houses every weekend in every market. Go to the nice ones (ARV) and the crap ones (repair costs). Learn in the field, not on a screen.

3. Don't pay for coaching or a mentor (yet). The best time to pay for a coach, mentor, or program is when you are already doing business and you want to go from A to C. B you can get to on your own, you want to build your own framework first, but you will need someone to help you get to C most of the time. Most people who pay for coaching, mentorship, and programs before they have done a deal are looking for the payment to generate the results, but most investors suffer from user error because of this.

4. Don't spend a lot of time in Facebook investing groups. You will never find a place with more spam and unscrupulous posters and tricks than in Facebook investing groups. Even the good ones have trouble because they want to grow so they allow too many people in and then the spam starts. Very few groups are good at moderation. Also, Facebook is where your time goes to die. You will get an alert and then you are looking at your friend's baby. Work the forums here instead.

5. Get your finances in order. Now. Today. Start doing this right now. If you want to invest in the future, you want to make sure that your financial life is under control and transparent. If you think you are ready to invest and you have no control or knowledge of your own financial situation, you are going to get sold on not just hard money, but thick money and you don't want that. First, clean up your house so you can expand it.