Posted over 3 years ago

The 8 Steps in the Journey of a “Boomerang Real Estate Investor"

These are the 8 Steps in the journey of a “Boomerang Real Estate Investor"

They are based on real people I work with now, in the real world.

Their story typically played out over the course of 1-3 years.

Here’s the breakdown of events before they decide to invest passively in real estate:

Step 1: person builds impressive corporate career. Makes great (heavily taxed) W2 salary for years. Some even making $300k+ annually, for years.
Step 2: starts/grows family. Dumps money into 401k.

Step 3: eventually realizes “this can’t be the way the American Dream is supposed to work. I have to do this another 20-30 years? “
Step 4: catches the real estate bug, somehow. Devours content on Biggerpockets.com. Listens to 200+ real estate podcasts. Attends meetups. Learns ‘enough to be dangerous.’
Step 5: compares real estate investing strategies. Gets overconfident. Wants more zeroes on their returns. Sees passive as ‘not good enough’ because: “why should I pay someone else to do something that I can do myself?” #famouslastwords
Step 6: Makes a critical, costly error. Burns years of time and thousands of dollars in the process. Decides to be an active investor, while working fulltime - a SFH flipper, a multifamily sponsor/operator, etc.
Step 7: burnt out, frustrated… short on time and long on experience: they reach back out after a literal 1-2 years have passed. They’ve got some crazy stories. In some cases, they became an active real estate investor only to find out they enjoyed their W2 career way more than doing real estate work. “The gurus were wrong.”
Step 8: we start the conversation about investing in actually passive real estate investments (e.g. syndications, amongst others).

Take a breath. Check your ego.

The grass is greener, but you don’t have to jump over the fence to watch it grow.