The Path to Investing

Real estate investing is considered by majority of business experts as one of the best ways to make your money grow. Investments in real estate produce varieties of income potential and creative profitability.

Step 1 – Capital

You’re going to need money and it’s always better to leverage other people’s money. So how do you do that? Learn about funding options such as private money lenders, real estate investment groups, and of course, understand your own financial limits. There are a myriad of ways and companies which you can leverage a 680 credit score or above in interest free ways (for up to 12 months) to get you started.

Once you have “how will I get the money” mapped out, you’ll need to move on to the next step which is getting educated.

Step 2 – Read, Join, Engage

To be able to grasp the environment of real property investment, you need to go figuratively back to school. The good news is that there is a wealth of free knowledge you can access in a variety of ways. Look up scholarly articles, get familiar with investing communities and reach out to experts online.

In addition to ramping up on the online experts, you will want to network & attend trainings and/or seminars concerned with business. Again, be sure to vet the venue and make sure the sponsors, speakers are in line with your goals whether it’s an interest in buy & hold, wholesaling, flipping, liens, etc. Meetups with real estate investors are a fun, local way to meet people in this space and depending on where you live, the speakers and guests the meetup organizers might have can be top notch.

Step 3 – Identify motivated sellers

Once you have the cash and have picked your investing genre to get your toes wet, you’ll need to get that first property.

The good news – now that you’ve been educating yourself and learning from the experts, you’ll be steered to techniques to vet them on your own and connect with investors. Be mindful of motivated sellers and competing to buy prime properties. You can watch deals go from interest to closed, see the rates and learn before you do your first one or you can skip the automation and do the search yourself leaving the competitive wheeling and dealing until you gain more experience.

Step 4 – Don’t hesitate to get a mentor

There is an entire marketplace for mentors who will help you for a fee score your first deal to completion. The best ones have references and I’ve seen rates for mentoring as low as $2,500.00 to help you find the right amount, get financing in order, help with picking the property, closing the deal, the flip process, and selling the house. I’ve seen some charge 10x that amount as well.

There are some on active real estate forums who are absolutely against this and feel that anyone worthwhile will give you advice for free. I’ve found that to be the opposite. Most worthwhile people charge for their expertise a fair amount and give you more value than what you pay for – but you have to value them first. There are a lot of amazing mentors and experts who will give some help for free of course, and it’s good advice and good strategy. However, if you want someone to really be there for you each step of the way and guide you then you need to have a paid contract in place to protect you because you’ll be telling them confidential information and you’ll want this relationship to be on a professional and confidential level.

Step 5 – Step on it

Last but not least, stop waiting. A recession could happen or not, markets can turn or not, but no one ever got anywhere just waiting. Start on your dream now, after all, once you know how you will get financed, have an education in real estate investing, have established a support group or entered a network of supportive investors to ping ideas off of, have a great mentor – your chances after doing all that work of making a costly mistake will be greatly lessened and you can feel confident in your first investment.