Why Newbies Should Focus on the 1st Deal (& Nothing Else)

I want to talk to you today about the importance of focusing on doing your first deal.

You may have ultimate end-goals like quitting your job, working for yourself, securing your retirement or leaving a legacy for your children. In order to accomplish those goals with apartment buildings, you might determine that you need to own 100 units (or whatever the number).

Those are good and worthwhile goals, and they’re important. But if you’re just starting out on your journey, then you need an interim goal, something you can focus on, something you think you can achieve and something that opens the door to bigger things.

The one interim goal I’m talking about is to focus on your first deal.

Why You Should Focus on Your First Deal (And Nothing Else)

Once you do that first deal, it proves to you not only that the whole apartment building investing thing works, but also that YOU can do it.
You now have experience and a track record that boost your self-confidence and make it easier to be taken seriously as a real estate syndicator.
You probably have a small number of investors that you can leverage into more dollars and/or referrals to other investors. This makes it easier to raise more money.
You probably have a good broker network in place, giving you deal flow you didn’t have before you did your first deal. This makes it easier to find the next deal.

All of this combined makes doing your second deal MUCH, MUCH easier. And that’s why you should focus like a laser on doing that first deal.

What Should Your First Deal Look Like?

In order to define what your first deal should look like, start with your end-goal in mind. If you want $10,000 per month in passive income and you do the math, you might conclude that you’ll need 100 apartment building units that you acquire with investor money.

If you wanted to get there by single family rentals, you’d have to buy a lot of them, and the likelihood of reaching your goal in the next five years will be difficult, if not impossible.

Therefore, given your stated goal, your first deal should be an apartment building between 10 and 30 units. Let’s say you focus on a 25-unit apartment building as your first deal. And let’s say it takes you a really long time to get that deal done. By “long time,” let’s say it’s a year. Or even a bit longer. Definitely not in the “instant gratification” and “get-rich-quick” timeframe.

You were at first frustrated with how long it’s taking to do your first deal, but now you find yourself with a 25-unit building that you bought for $1M with other people’s money.

You’re stunned. You can’t believe it. All of sudden you’re seeing $2,500 per month in passive income, and you’re 25% towards your goal of a 100 units.

You’re actually more than 25% there. Chances are, you already have some other deals in your pipeline. And they’re probably bigger than 25 units. I’m willing to bet that next deal is somewhere between 50 and 75 units. And now you can see yourself doing that kind of deal. In fact, you already have about 60% of the money committed from investors. It most certainly won’t take another year and a half to do that second deal.

Six months later you close on your second deal, a 60-unit building, and you’re about a week away from putting a 91-unit under contract.

Conclusion

Even though it took FOREVER to do your first deal, once you did, a whole new world of possibilities opened up for you. And in relatively short order (3-5 years), you’ve achieved your goal of 100 units and $10,000 of passive income.

Now you can do that which you REALLY wanted to do when you first set out on this journey. You’ve arrived. And it’s all because of that very first deal.

Do you see how critical your first deal is? Does it make sense not to be overwhelmed by your end-goal but set an achievable interim goal and focus like a laser on that and nothing else?

What does your first deal look like?

Leave a comment, and let’s talk!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.