All Forum Posts by: Ryan Dao

Hey! So everyone in real estate makes mistakes, doesn't matter if you are Donald Trump, Grant Cardone, the average Joe, or someone who maxed out their credit card and blew $30,000 on Real Estate courses from "gurus" because they were promised overnight riches. We all make mistakes, and there's no way to escape them, but its about learning from them. 

I made this discussion so others could learn from your mistakes and people (myself included) would not make the exact same mistakes.

So do you have any regrets that you made during your entire real estate career that you wished you could invent a time machine just to stop yourself from doing? Maybe it's from buying the wrong house because it was really cheap, or you didn't screen these tenants well enough and they burnt your house down and fled town. Maybe there was a specific law about house hacking that you didn't know and it's preventing you from making any money. Maybe you didn't put enough money for another A/C unit after your tenant "accidentally" destroyed after you got into an argument about their lease. Any advice is welcome and encouraged.

Who knows? Maybe you're about to make the exact same mistake.

I’m just gonna bump this to see if some more people want to chime in

Now I know there are many factors such as location and stuff like that but let's consider the external factors to not affect this. Also I do realize that everyone is different, but from your experience, would you say, a SFH or Duplex is a better investment?

I would like to add my own input and see if what I believe is correct:

It seems to me that there's no reason to spend $100,000 on a single unit property when you can invest that $100,000 on a property with two units which you can 

I've been reading around a lot and noticed that duplexes seem to have an edge over a SFH, but there are still a lot of people who prefer SFH, so another question that I have why would one buy a SFH over a Duplex? Is it because SFHs is cheaper? Or are they easier to find? Or is it easier to manage?

People say SFH are a good way to get started in investing but I actually think the opposite. If you only have one SFH, then if you can't rent it out, you start losing money on it.

Mary B. Shannan Bowen Yes, I’ve definitely been looking at REIAs and Ive kinda just been trying to scout for some properties. I’m not really expecting much from them but I am just trying to get some people’s input on the houses I’ve been scouting. Thanks for your advice! I really appreciate it!

I've been wanting to get my feet wet with real estate and since I really can't legally sign a contract yet, unless I get my parents to co-sign a contract (but I don't want to ask them to co-sign until I prove to them that I know the ins and outs of real estate), I decided to get started with bird dogging instead of some other methods such as wholesaling. I've been walking around my neighborhood and some other places and I've been scouting the area for some vacant looking/owner neglected houses, hoping to find some solid deals for anyone who wanted to invest in Philadelphia

If anyone is interested, they can send me a private message and I can send them the houses that I've found. I don't think it would hurt to give it a shot, and if anyone wants to give me advice on how I can improve with bird dogging after looking at my properties. 

So I've been watching Grant Cardone TV for a while and I know that he's a little smug and cocky and likes to talk about his money (but who wouldn't be if they were rich).

I watched a video about him talking about how to start investing in Real Estate and he gave the 3 following tips:

1) Never rely on one thing of anything

Don't buy single-family homes because if that one source of income runs out, for example, your tenant moves out, you're left with a liability; your source of income is now an upkeep where you're losing money

2) Don’t buy based on your budget 

I may be interpreting this wrong but you shouldn't buy a small house because you have a small budget. You should go big. if you have $30k, don't buy a house based on that.

3) Don’t buy less than 16 units

Don't buy any property where there are less than 16 units. You want to have a lot of sources of income.

The first one I agree with but I'm not sure if I was misinterpreting his tips or something because the second one and third one doesn't seem practical to me. If you only have $40,000, you shouldn't try to buy a $3M apartment or something. Same thing goes for the third tip. Of course its better to have multiple sources of income, but you need a lot of money to purchase a property like that. 

What are your thoughts on these?

Btw the link to the video with the tips is here

@Alex Young

Hey, Alex, welcome to BP and I hope you learn a lot here. Anyways, at 26 years old, you should be able to open a bank account without your parents as you are no longer a minor and you don't have to legally have them as a co applicant. 

Depending on your bank, (I opened mine with Santander so I'm not 100% of the process is different) you only need a few things to open it and I do believe you may be able to even open it online if you have enough credit history or something like that. Anyways, in the case you do it in person, you only need a passport (or some type of ID), a minimum deposit, health insurance (this one I'm not entirely sure about but the lady that I opened with took mine so I don't know what its needed for), social security number, some other standard types of identification, and you need to sign some paperwork accepting stuff about overdue drafts or setting up options or something. It's basically info about yourself. 

Also I did open my account with a parent (I'm still a minor so I legally had to), but I do believe the process is the same without a co-applicant. If not, that's my fault.

@Margaret Rodriguez

Wow, I didn't expect this post to be motivational and I surely didn't expect it to be very emotional. This post really caught me off-guard (in a really good way) and I've definitely going to work on learning more and more about real estate. I will continue to share my adventures. Thank you so much.

And thank you everyone else for your posts of praise and encouragement. They motivate me and probably other people to continue!

@Joe Villeneuve and @David Faulkner

Thanks for your answers, I knew it was a variety of reasons but I wasn't able to completely pinpoint what those reasons were. I appreciate it!

This might warrant some raised eyebrows but I always asked myself the same question: 

If real estate is a great way to become wealthy, why isn't everyone doing it?

Now I'm not saying investing in real estate is easy, because I know that it's not easy. I know that it requires a lot of hustle and grinding. However, I know a lot of people who work 3-4 jobs and easily work 60 hours a week. They obviously are determined to make money, and whether they are living paycheck to paycheck or not, why don't these people working so many shifts save up money to buy a house and slowly progress their way towards passive income? 

Is it because of fear of going further in debt? Is it because they don't know real estate investing exist? 

I always ask this question on Google but there's not an answer that answers it.