Need recommendation for beginner real estate investing books/material

[Tess Faczan]

Hi everyone, I'm new to investing and very interested in learning about buying and holding, and lease options on single family homes, and also on setting up a legal entity as a real estate investor. Does anyone have any recommendations on up-to-date material and resources I can begin learning without having to spend hundreds of dollars on education. I live in southern California, but will probably be doing most of my investing in Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia. :lol:

[Paul Strauss]

Originally posted by Tess Faczan:

Hi everyone, I'm new to investing and very interested in learning about buying and holding, and lease options on single family homes, and also on setting up a legal entity as a real estate investor. Does anyone have any recommendations on up-to-date material and resources I can begin learning without having to spend hundreds of dollars on education. I live in southern California, but will probably be doing most of my investing in Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia. :lol:

Wow, that's a lot of tactical information covering a lot of geography.

I would suggest this:

Define as clearly as possible what you NEED and/or WANT. You seem all rev'd up, but until you focus in on what you actually need and want- you really won't know which way to go with real estate investing.

There are TWO main paths, and successful investors usually follow both:

1. Rental / Transactional income-- comes from rents, and "doing deals" to generate quick cash. It's a job. Landlording, and exploiting opportunities. You do the job, you get paid. It's how almost everyone gets started, and how many have continued to generate a nice living for years.

2. Wealth creation. Wealth in real estate comes from leverage, and appreciation. This comes from buying in appreciating markets (and there are many- even now), using leverage to magnify ROI. This is where ultra-successful investors create legacy wealth.

Of course the best of both worlds is where you want to be, and it's relatively SIMPLE, though it's NOT necessarily easy.

This is something I learned the hard way, but once I learned it- my business took off: There's a single master-skill to do both: analysis. Some will warn you that you don't want "analysis paralysis" and you need to "just do it" and "get started"-- and while there's some merit to that, the vast majority of people who have "analysis paralysis" really just have plain old paralysis-- they aren't doing ANYTHING.

Through research and analysis, your objective should be to discover opportunities that others aren't necessarily seeing. Then you can carefully "shop" those opportunities-- getting people to pay you for the research. You don't necessarily want to be an unlicensed realtor / broker - "Bird Dog", you want to sell opportunity, not broker transactions.

I'd be happy to discuss this method-- employed by my company for years with great success-- in detail if you'd like to speak-- you can pm me and I'd love to chat.

And full disclosure- I'm NOT a "coach" or "consultant" and I have NOTHING for sale, and this isn't an attempt to sell anything. My selfish motivation quite simply is to grow my network, and specifically I'm seeking "human intelligence" in markets all over the country to do what I've described above.