Experiences of IDEAL GROWERS

How do you describe something that is different for each person? The “E” in GROWER, which is, as you know by now, the right brain part of the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system, stands for “Experiences”.

As described in previous articles, mentoring is an individual activity and each person has a different starting point and a different set of goals. That means that the steps that need to be taken to reach these goals are different and the experiences while taking these steps are also different from one person to the next.

When thinking about how to describe the “Experience” part of the IDEAL GROWER system I wondered if there are experiences that are particularly common with most of the mentoring clients I work with.

There actually are a few of these recurring experiences. The one I would say happens most often in the early stages of the program is related to beauty.

Here is the definition I found online: Beauty is a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. 

How does that apply to the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system? Well, since the financial crisis of 2008-2010, the real estate market has seen a steady rise. That is owed to two aspects:

1. - The crisis has created a shortage of builders and in turn a shortage of new real estate coming onto the market. At the same time, the population in the US keeps growing. Whenever there is limited supply and increasing demand prices rise. That is true for real estate as for anything else.
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3. - When the economy started to recover from the recession, it did not recover in the same intensity all over the country. In some locations, the recovery was stronger while in other areas it was weaker. Especially strong markets we locations like the San Francisco Bay Area, also often called Silicone Valley, as well as places like Seattle, New York, and others. In these booming markets prices increased so much so fast that many people could not afford to buy anything anymore and soon also could barely afford to rent either.

The IDEAL GROWER system promotes the creation of passive income through real estate investments. Ultimately you will reach economic and financial independence when you use the mentoring advice and apply what the IDEAL GROWER system teaches.

In earlier articles, I described the importance of performance. That, in a nutshell, means, you want to purchase your cash flow producing real estate in locations that give you good performance. I recommend using the 1% rule as a guideline to determine if performance is sufficient.

When we have gotten through the first few mentoring sessions in the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system I typically ask my clients to start identifying the first properties. We don’t do that randomly. We develop a list of criteria that mimic the 1% rule and I provide a set of research reports that were developed by people I follow. I good example would be GRE by Keith Weinhold. I have been following his podcast and his teachings for a long time and got introduced to the locations I myself invest using his reports.

For most people, the locations described in the reports are not closet o home but hundreds or thousands of miles away. In addition to the distance, the properties are in a price range of $80K - $150K.

Armed with these and a few more criteria my mentoring clients go out to search the internet using platforms like Zillow or Redfin and the like. When we come together again, I ask what the experiences with the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system were since we last talked. Often my clients report that they hate, dislike, ashore the properties they found.
Why? Because they look at the information with an “experience bias”. 

It is human nature to judge and evaluate things initially by comparing it to what we already know. Most of us have experienced finding and moving into a new place with our parents. Often after that we have our own experience of looking for a place to live (even if it is for rent). Maybe we later bought a place for ourselves a d our family.

In each of those experiences, we applied practical criteria combined with emotional criteria. Research actually shows that more than 65% of decisions to purchase real estate are made mostly on emotional criteria. In a nutshell, we judge a property by asking ourselves if we like it. To answer that question we try to imagine if we can see ourselves living in the property. This is a very strong emotion that can easily overwhelm a lot, if not all, the practical criteria we may have set in our mentoring session before setting out to look for candidate properties.

It took me years to get better at suppressing the emotional reaction to a property when I first see it (or pictures of it) and letting the rational and practical criteria that determine if it is a good or bad investment guide me.

As with all the ‘right-brain’ parts of the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system, and especially those that fall to the GROWER part, what we need to learn is to change our minds and our behaviors.

There are many more experiences that are getting discussed in the mentoring sessions as we progress and work step by step to achieve the goals we defined for economic and financial independence. The emotional reaction to the first candidate investment properties is just an example to give you a taste.

As always, please consider signing up for a free strategy session so I can help you determine if the IDEAL GROWER mentoring system is for you and will potentially help you achieve your goals.

Next time we will finish this series by talking about the results of your activities that you completed as a dedicated IDEAL GROWER.