Lend to gain experience? Or gain experience to lend?

[Niko Lyons]

Good Evening BP! I am excited to be making my second post here. I recently sold my first ever investment, which I house hacked in Clearwater, FL. I wrote in a bit more detail about that experience in my only other post (up to this point). Long story short, I have 45k I am looking to invest and I'm eager to learn and gain experience but am not willing to make an impulse decision putting it in a riskier situation than is necessary. 

The knowledge I gained from the first property was immense. In a span of 15 month I went from being your average 22 year old apartment tenant to someone learning how to negotiate contracts, hire contractors and engineers and create a plan to make my vision a reality. Let me tell you, it was a steep learning curve.  However I couldn't be happier with how it turned out on closing day. No skipped steps, everything done safely and properly allowed me to hand the keys to the buyer with full confidence that this home would be as good to him as it was to me. 

While my purpose for this post is to ask a question I'd rather open a larger discussion with as many people as possible about the following:

Ep. 408 of our beloved BP podcast features an investor, Emma Powell. One of her strategies to get the snowball rolling downhill was to be a private lender. Lending to other, much more experienced real estate investors with the interest of learning from them on a deal that Emma was now involved with as a lender. So she was now learning a ton of info from this investor as well as adding value to her new partners business in the way of providing capital.

I'm fascinated with that concept and am wondering if anyone else has had good luck with that in the beginning.

Alternatively, I have been looking into finding partners such as hard money lenders, agents, contractors, etc. to help do my own flips or BRRRR's. (Hard or private money because due to COVID I no longer am an ideal candidate for conventional loans.)

Thank you all in advanced and I look forward to hearing back from you!

Have a great evening,

Niko Lyons.