Brand New - Seeking Advice

[Brittani Miller]

Hey Team!!! 

Brittani Miller here! 26 yrs old, married for a year with no experience. I want to get in to the real estate investing world and I'm unclear where to start! I would love to hear some of the first steps you all took. I know that this is something that takes education and training and I'm ready and willing to be in this for the long haul. What are some classes that are worth the time and money and some books that you started off with?

Thanks 

[William Carson]

Learn as much as you can before you get started, find someone to mentor you or at least bounce ideas off of, and most importantly....network, network, network! It's also very important to have your team in place before you go out and start working deals. Make sure you have at least 1 investor friendly realtor, a title agent and/or real estate attorney, a list of contractors you can call, a list of wholesalers or rehabbers (depending on if you want to rehab and flip/hold or wholesale respectively), and an accountant that specializes in real estate. 

Practice. I probably scratched out 100 deals on paper just to practice and familiarize myself with the numbers, formulas, and equations before I went out and made my first offer.

Another important thing to have in place is your funding. I made the mistake on my first attempt at a deal to get it under contract and then worry about the funding. Big mistake! First time investor in a rural area, the institutions wanted nothing to do with me. That deal fell through. Subsequently, I had to turn to local private money, which is actually much easier to work through as there aren't nearly as many stipulations as there are with hard money and YOU get to dictate the terms. If you are going to use private money, get a business prospectus and presentation put together, write down names of people you know that may have money to invest and sell the benefits that investing with you offer such as aggressive earnings, secure collateral, potential annual earnings, they become the bank etc, attend any real estate meet-ups in your area, and sell yourself. It happens fast. If you can find one or two people that will invest in you, you will be well on your way to financial independence. If you will be using private money, it is absolutely vital that you and your investor work with attorneys to avoid any possible lending or banking violations when drafting your contracts.

Treat your real estate investing like a business, not a hobby. Make business cards, flyers, make a Facebook page, get a business phone number and start from there. You'll be surprised how quickly your business will grow if you have everything and everyone in place before you start, and network, network, network!

Hope this helps.