Landlord in Chapel Hill, NC looks for first "creative" deal

[Ashraf Farrag]

Greetings,

I am currently a landlord of a single property, own my current home as well as a rather time-consuming retail business. My goal is to diversify by initially doing RE part-time and use some of the proceeds to help provide capital to acquire a commercial building for it and ideally transition out of my current business into RE full-time.

I have a couple of audio courses (LeGrand, Harbolt) that I have listened to, have been attending the local REIA chapter meetings for almost two years and have gone to some of the single day seminars (LeGrand and Harbolt).

Obviously, continual education for any discipline is important...I have watched several seminars on here but I seem to be stuck in a chicken or the egg situation in terms of moving forward and am hoping to get some advice here on what next steps to take.

Why I feel "stuck":

I have started to look for a wholesale or terms type of deal but what I keep running up against is that I don't feel like I have adequate training to actually get it off the ground. My life background is what one might call someone that is probably over-educated (too much formal school can definitely be a bad thing!) I have also been a teacher/instructor at the college level as well as for more "hands on" type of hobbies that require instruction and "sign-off" for an individual to "operate independently", hence my apprehension to try and tackle a deal without what I feel is either adequate training or supervision to ensure success. I do know there will be failure along the way but what I've learned in other realms is that proper instruction tends to help mitigate the failures. I've tried to network within the REIA to get a mentor offering up my team's professional skills in IT and Marketing but have not managed to find someone willing to do that as of yet. Ah. From the pop-up, the marketplace is the place for that on here...okay...

I don't really have a lot of time to be able to put together all the information myself (reference time-consuming business as primary income) and I am seriously thinking about in-person training (LeGrand) but I don't see a lot of support in favor of this on here. What I know about my business is that investing in good training has improved my business in profitability and ease of operation...

What I've done recently to try and get started:

I found a couple of local FSBOs and dug up some call scripts but it seems like what I really need is to setup a stream to have multiple deals in front of me given how many you need before you get one to "work"? (I see the same theme in my business) - do I talk to them and then figure out what sort of creative investment opportunity can be crafted and then find someone to help structure it once I see there is a "live target"?

Thanks for reading and I look forward to getting started!