If You Were to Start Investing from Scratch in 2025, What Would You Do Differently?

[Hector Espinosa]

Let’s say you’re starting from zero in 2025—no properties, no deals, just the knowledge and lessons you’ve picked from BiggerPockets, books you have read and videos you have watched.

What would you do differently this time around?

I understand that everyone has unique goals, and responses will vary depending on those objectives. However, your answer could include, but is not limited to:

• Market Focus: Would you stick to cash-flow-heavy areas, chase appreciation, or go after niche markets like short-term rentals?
• Property Type: Multi-family? Single-family? Commercial? Maybe something unconventional like storage units or mobile home parks?
• Financing: Would you try creative strategies like seller financing, BRRRR, or syndications, or stick with traditional loans?
• Avoiding Mistakes: What’s the one thing you wish you could go back and tell your beginner self?
• Leverage Tech: What apps, tools, or platforms would you use to streamline your daily activities?

In my case, living in a high-cost area, I’m looking for out-of-state investment and focused on multi-family (duplex,triplex and quadruplex) but open to single family homes too. Because of this, I have been meeting with different people in different areas and building a team which helps me to find and buy my first property although it hasn't been easy. Looking for cash-flow properties is hard these days and even when I have found a couple I feel is not worth the risk. Most of the properties I have found cash-flow <3000 per year. Well, if I could have 50 that cash 3k per year wouldn’t be that bad but as a starting point I feel I should wait a little bit more. I could be wrong and any feedback is welcomed. As a side note, most of the properties I have been targeting were Neighborhood grade C which are quite old and one of my concerns is that I may need to spend a lot of money on repairs and maintenance.

I feel that I would need to wait a little bit more and maybe save more for my down payment and try to target Neighborhoods grade B.

I'm trying to do an FHA loan and buy a house in my local market but even when I'm targeting properties between < 600,000 (which would be a 2Bed, 2 Ba in a good condition), my monthly payment would be around 5,000 which is impossible to pay for me.

So, it has not been easy and it won’t be but I’ll keep looking until I find one property that meets my requirements and helps me to achieve my goals. Then, I’ll start the process for the second one, and so on…

What about you? Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve done dozens of deals, I’d love to hear your perspective. What’s your 2025 starting-from-scratch game plan?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and insights.

If You Were to Start Investing from Scratch in 2025, What Would You Do Differently?

[JD Martin]

If I was starting all over I would do two things different:

1. I would have focused on the highest paying W2 I could find/achieve as early as possible in a field I enjoyed;

2. I would have bought rental properties of any sort before I bought my primary home. 

On point #1, I didn't start making any reasonable money until I was closing out my 30's. That's almost 20 years of wasted time that was a ***** to make up later. You can't invest money you don't have. I was always frugal, but I never had enough significant money to invest because I didn't make enough money. 

On point #2, I should have started with a duplex or triplex, lived in the crappiest part and rented the others out while I rehabbed that one, then moved, rented out my unit and did it again. Once again, the loss of the compounding factor by concentrating on my personal home rather than an investment was significant. 

There were a myriad of reasons for these things - some excuses, some legitimate - but the reasons don't matter, only the results matter. I ended up having to kill it in my 40's to make up for all the lost time. The only thing I'll say is that I woke up before it was too late, because yes there is a point where it's "too late" unless you are immortal. There's no substitute for the power of time - compounding interest, appreciation, inflation capture. The sooner you get started, the sooner you're going to get wherever it is you want to be.