​Why you should join your local REIA club

Why you should join your local REIA club

There are a bunch of reasons to join your local REIA club. All of them can be directly tied to your success.

First off, most REIA clubs offer discount to both local and national service providers. In many cases your first purchase at Home Depot or Sherwin Williams will pay for your annual REIA membership. The local discounts can be anything from legal and accounting services to home staging and dumpster services. The bigger the club the more discounts they will generally offer.

We all know that real estate is a team sport. You can find your entire team at a REIA meeting. The really exciting part is that when you need a real estate attorney, you can easily find out who all of the other investors are using. This social proof is a very good indicator that you have found someone who understands and can handle the needs of investors. This is true for every member of your team, from insurance providers, to accountants, to bankers, and hard money lenders. If the other members of the club are using that person, then there is a pretty good chance that you will want to use them as well. This sure beats the trial and error method of finding a team, then firing them, and looking for replacements.

You can also locate a good mentor are your local REIA club. Mentors come in all shapes and sizes, some of the best ones will be free. A mentor is really just a seasoned investor who has made his money and is willing to share with new investors exactly how he did it. That is one of the sexiest things about real estate, is the willingness of successful people to share their secrets.

Networking with other local investors is anther very powerful reason to join your local REIA club. The reason that networking is important is two-fold. First you can network to find out what types of deals other local investors are doing. This is useful because you really don’t want every property that you look at, but knowing who else might want a property can make you a lot of money. For example, if I don’t want rental property in a certain neighborhood and I know that Fred is buying everything that he can find over there, then I have a pretty good indication that I can wholesale a property in that area to Fred even though I have no use for that deal. The second value in networking is finding out who you can reach out to when you have a question. For example if you think you have found a good commercial deal, but you aren’t really sure, it would very useful to know a local guy who buys and sells commercial property.

You will also find that your REIA club will become your support structure as you travel down the lonely road of the real estate investor. You friends will tell you that you are crazy. Your family will tell you that you can’t make money in real estate. They are all wrong but having a bunch of other investors around you will make it easier to withstand their silly put downs on your way to financial freedom.

I saved the biggest and best benefit of joining a REIA club for last, education. For you to be successful in real estate, you need two things. You need motivation and you need education. There is no greater source for quality education that a well-run REIA club. The club will keep you up to date on changes to local laws, local market trends, and it will bring you investor education that you would never have dreamed of looking for. The club will expose you to techniques and tricks that will speed up your learning curve and help you build your dream life. If that doesn’t excite you then you are dead inside.

For those of you who do not have a REIA club in your area, I encourage you to start one. You may not be the perfect person to start a club, but nobody else is either. I started or rather took over and grew my REIA club because the lady who stated the club in 1982 passed away suddenly with no apparent heir to take over the group. The hours are long but the emotional rewards are immeasurable. Please don’t do this and think you are going to make a pile of money; that is the wrong motivation.

To your success

Josh