Real Estate Investing for People Pressed for Time

“I just don’t have the time.” It’s a common refrain for the busy professional, and sometimes it has merit. Between family obligations, fitness, community involvement, hobbies, and a busy career, there never seem to be enough hours in the day.

So how can a busy professional fit real estate investing into the mix? After all, real estate investing is a career and a skill set unto itself. How to do it if every hour already feels committed?

But this is your financial future we’re talking about — financial freedom, legacy, and generational wealth. It can’t wait for retirement, because retirement will be too late.

So how do you take the “time commitment” out of real estate and still do it successfully? This guide is for the busy professionals who need to make as efficient use of their attention as possible — to help them make the most money as a real estate investor with the least expenditure of time.

Make Peace with the Time-For-Money Exchange

First things first … There are two kinds of beginner real estate investors — those who don’t have enough time, and those who don’t have enough money. Those who don’t have enough money need to leverage time; those who don’t have enough time need to leverage money.

You will always run into some know-it-all investor who will try to tell you “Why pay a big wholesaler fee?! Just knock on doors yourself and you get to keep all the money!” Or “Don’t burn 7% of your rent on a property manager! Just collect the rent and answer tenant complaints yourself!” Or “Don’t give a REALTOR® 6%! Just sell for-sale-by-owner and keep the money!”

Don’t forget which side of the equation you are on. If you are reading this guide, you are on the “too little time” end of the spectrum. If you listen to these busybodies’ penny-pinching advice, you will never get started because you don’t have time to knock on doors, write letters, stage houses, or hang bandit signs.

In fact, there is no shame in being on the “too-little-time” side. As they become more successful, every real estate investor reaches the point where they have too little time. They instead need to leverage their money — those big bucks they made from their first few deals — to extract some of their personal time from the process.

After all, trading money for time is how you scale a real estate business. Sure, you may not technically need a property manager for one rental home … But what about when you have ten or twenty rental homes? You’re going to have to rely on a property manager. If you’re handling it, you may be able to DIY the renovation on one fix-and-flip deal … But what about when you have ten or twenty flips in process? You will have to rely on a contractor.

Yes, you give up a little of your margin … but your income potential effectively becomes infinite because you don’t have to invest your own personal time. You have extracted your time from the equation because you don’t have to do the work — your system does the work for you.

Finding Deals With Little Time

First, let’s talk about how to find deals with limited time. Finding deals can be one of the most time-consuming activities real estate investors must engage in. Here are a few avenues to buy back that time.

Lead-Generators

There are a variety of ways you can pay people to bring you leads. These range from “bird dogs” — effectively “intern” real estate investors whom you pay a small fee to knock on doors and bring you potential deals — to sophisticated lead-gen operations run by virtual assistants sending emails, mailing letters, and making phone calls to produce motivated sellers for you to contact. At the top of the heap, you can buy into a “marketing collective,” where you get access to a portion of the calls that come from an expensive billboard ad, TV ad, or radio ad.

Paying for leads cuts a lot of the work out of the deal-flow cycle … but you still have to close the deals. If you want to extract even more time out of the deal-generation process, we need a different solution.

REALTORs®

REALTORs® are “low-hanging fruit.” There are a million of them, and they are motivated to find you deals. However, not every REALTOR® is an ideal partner for a real estate investor. Most of them are taught to find primary residences for families, and they don’t understand the factors that real estate investors look for.

Nevertheless, if you can give a motivated REALTOR® criteria to look for — fixer-uppers in infill neighborhoods with motivated sellers, for example — you may find them to be a zero-maintenance source of deals.

Wholesalers

Real estate wholesalers go a step further than lead generators — they actually close the deal and then sell you the contract for a markup fee. You will pay higher fees to wholesalers than you will to lead-gen services … but the wholesaler is bringing you a deal on a silver platter, so it might well be worth it for the time you save.

You can meet wholesalers by searching online or attending local real estate investment meetups.

Turnkey Retailers

Turnkey retailers go a step further than wholesalers. They not only find the deal for you — they renovate it and possibly even put a tenant in place. Some of them even guarantee cash flow from Day One.

This is the quickest, easiest way to acquire rental property. You won’t get a deal well below market, but it takes almost no time investment. With a trustworthy turnkey retailer, you may not even need to bother visiting the property!

Relying On Professionals

Because you have little time, DIY is out of the question. From Day 1, you will be relying on professionals. With the right team of professionals, you may not even need to lift a finger — your team does the hard work and even communicates with each other (instead of you) to get deals done on your behalf.

Here are some professionals to get on your team to reduce the time commitment of your investing career.

Property Managers

Property managers take over the day-to-day management duties of your rental property, including collecting the rent, fielding maintenance requests, responding to tenant feedback, contracting repairs, turning over vacant units, and finding new tenants.

They will usually perform this service for a percentage of the rent — anywhere from 3%-10% depending on the category of property.

Make sure to shop around for property managers and find the best confluence of cost vs. competence. Look for property managers with positive testimonials and references, as well as a long track record in business, and be prepared to pay a little more for more expertise — this will save you time and money in the long run.

Property managers can be your greatest ally in saving you time — often they can visit the property and tell you right away if it looks like a promising investment.

Contractors

If you flip or rehab property, you will need a relationship with a good general contractor — preferably more than one. General contractors can subcontract teams to handle multiple rehabs for you at once, but it helps to know more than one in case your favorite contractor gets booked up.

Keep in mind, too, that contractors are notorious for performing a handful of perfect rehabs and then suddenly failing or dipping out, leaving you high and dry. Basically, you can trust a good contractor … until you can’t. That’s why it is especially important to have relationships with more than one.

REALTORs®

REALTORs® are your go-to solution for selling your property when it’s time to exit. Bear in mind, though, that traditional REALTORs®’ commission fees tend to border on highway robbery. You might want to look into a “flat-fee” REALTOR® — one that charges a flat fee rather than a percentage of the sale. You can often save a fortune on REALTOR® commissions with a flat-fee broker compared to a standard REALTOR®.

Lawyers

As a real estate investor, you will depend on lawyers for a variety of tasks, including contract inspection, title work, and (if it comes to it) eviction and even litigation. Forming relationships with a variety of different lawyers in different real estate specialties can save you a lot of time — just forward paperwork to them and wait for the advice (and the bills) to roll in.

Insurance Agent

Insurance agents make at least part of your expense analysis easier. With a simple phone call and an address, they can tell you how much insurance expenses to budget for.

Mortgage Brokers

Many investors get loans online nowadays, but the traditional mortgage broker can definitely save you some time. Simply tell your mortgage broker about the deal you are considering, let them do their thing, and review the mortgage terms they come back with.

Outsourcing Basic Tasks

In addition to professional tasks, real estate investing comes with a slew of “basic” tasks that you don’t want to have to do yourself … but you also don’t want to have to pay top dollar for. These are tasks you can consider outsourcing.

Freelancers

For one-off tasks, you can often hire a freelancer. Freelancers may be able to design brochures and marketing collateral, edit property photos, even perform tasks like calling rent comparables or performing comparative market analyses on properties.

Virtual Assistants

In the days of AI, “virtual assistant” is becoming something of a misnomer. The term “virtual assistant” or VA has classically referred to a remote assistant — often an assistant in a foreign country with a lower cost of living so you can leverage less expensive labor for low-level tasks.

A VA can be trained to perform all manner of tasks, including but not limited to creating marketing collateral, interacting with tenants, scheduling routine maintenance, setting appointments, preparing your personal financial statement … even analyzing deals or making lead-generation phone calls. Your VA may even be able to call team members like your insurance agent, property manager, or contractor and get things in motion.

The key to working with VAs is to set standard operating procedures (SOP) for them to follow. To create an SOP, you have to know how the procedure works. As such, it helps greatly if you or someone under you understands the procedure from front to back so you can create a step-by-step guide to the SOP for your VA to follow.

Leveraging Automation

Of course, the least-expensive way to save time is not to hire or outsource, but to automate. Software solutions cost less than human time, and the more you can automate, the better. Here are some ways busy professionals can leverage automation in their real estate investment career:

Deal Search

Certain software solutions are capable of scanning the public-facing real estate market and identifying property for sale that might meet your criteria — for example, below-market prices, specific locations, motivated sellers, fixer-uppers, etc.

Deal Analysis

Deal analysis is at least partially about crunching numbers, and computers are especially good at that. Some software solutions take basic deal information and spit out high-level projections of potential investment performance, including cap rates, net operating income, cash-on-cash return, and potential ROI.

These software solutions are getting better, but they still don’t compare to in-depth human analysis. Until AI advances further, these tools should be seen as an “at-a-glance” indicator of whether or not a deal merits further consideration.

Property Management

Certain software solutions make the process of DIY property management much quicker, potentially eliminating the need for an expensive property manager. Software solutions can generate lease contracts, collect e-signatures, perform tenant background checks … even facilitate automated rent payment.

Bookkeeping

Automated bookkeeping software can potentially reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get your financials in order — for tax time, loan applications, or at the time of sale or partnership. Bookkeeping software can pull data directly from your property management platform and generate compliant reports.

Eventually, every real estate investor will be in your shoes — looking for a way to invest in real estate with a minimal investment of time. After all, most of us invest in real estate because we want to be lying on a beach somewhere, not up to our elbows in drywall. With the right partnerships, outsourcing, and automation, it’s more than possible to build a massive real estate empire that takes little or none of your own personal time!