What do the top real estate professionals say about the path to success in real estate investing?
There are some very concrete steps the dedicated investor can take to put them on the road to success in real estate investing. This is not brain surgery; in fact, it’s not very difficult at all. If you’re prepared to dedicate yourself to following a few simple guidelines, you could find yourself on track to making your real estate investment dreams come true.
Let’s take a look at some of the key points the pros consider essential to success in the field of real estate investing:
- Execution
- Support Systems
- Marketing
- Funding
It’s All About Execution
The fact is, nothing happens until you decide to execute. You know what you need to do, now you just have to get off your butt and do it. Like most other endeavors in life, procrastination is a success killer. You can do all the homework, read all the best-selling real estate investment books, attend all the seminars, and listen to all the experts, but if you don’t get out in the real world and execute what you’ve learned, you will get nowhere fast.
Support Systems
Many real estate pros say that a smart use of time and money is to establish a support system. This can be an informal relationship with a mentor – someone you know who has been successful in real estate – or establishing a formal relationship, for a fee, with an acknowledged real estate pro who teaches students the ins and outs of real estate investing.
Your support system, whether an informal one with an acquaintance, or a paid relationship with a successful real estate pro, will go a long way towards helping you overcome the common and not so common issues all real estate investors encounter as they go about making their living.
Typical real estate investment support systems:
Informal Mentoring
In this type of support relationship, you are using the advice and guidance of an individual who has demonstrated success in the area of real estate investing. Typically this person is an acquaintance, usually a friend or relative. Make sure they have what it takes to teach you what you need to know. Otherwise you’re both wasting your time.
Professional Mentoring
A top real estate professional can provide invaluable help, not only to the beginner, but also to folks who’ve been at it for a while but would like to enjoy a little more success, or simply want to dust off and improve existing techniques. Some of the things you can expect in this paid relationship should include the following:
- Live coaching – This is a tremendous help and can take a couple of different forms:
- One-on-one – Talking one-on-one to your coach during a regularly scheduled phone call
- Group – Interacting with your coach in a group environment via a format like Google Groups, or individually via live chat.
- Financial advice – Your paid real estate coach should be able to provide you with financial advice. This would include details on working with the following:
- Private lenders
- Banks
- Other sources
Marketing
- Postcard Marketing – This is a great way to market your real estate investment business. You can unleash an aggressive postcard campaign targeted to the following recipients:
- Private lenders – these are the folks with whom you have already spoken and now you want to move the ball down the road.
- Motivated sellers – the people who have hot properties.
- Real estate agents – Realtors are a great source of help and information.
- Finding deals off market – Using direct mail, scripts, dialogs, postcards and other methods optimizing efforts to find off market deals.
- Marketing to general population of private lenders – this would be a dedicated campaign to contact potential private lenders and investors.
- Marketing to select private lenders – Targeted to private lenders who are pre-disposed and ready to do business with you. If you’re raising money for yourself, you want private lenders who are pre-disposed and ready to lend to you.
Funding
Funding for your deals is one of the most critical elements in all of real estate investing. Whether you have already established relationships with a range of funding sources like private lenders, banks, credit unions, and other sources of funds, or you’re trying to establish those relationships, it’s important to learn more about this important task.
Private Lenders – These are the individuals with whom you should be trying to establish a business relationship. They make a wonderful resource for borrowing money to buy investment properties. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the laws applicable to marketing to private lenders before you begin.
One of the advantages of many private lenders is they are asset-based, rather than credit-based lenders. This means that as long as your deal is solid, your credit score is not as important as it might be with credit-based lenders like banks.
Institutional Lenders – Banks, credit unions and other institutional lenders are credit-based lenders, meaning they are much more concerned about your credit history than the typical private lender. In order to borrow money from them you must demonstrate an excellent credit history and a solid track record of paying your bills.
It can be much more difficult to get funding from an institutional lender because of their rigid, credit-based lending policies. Many real estate professionals try to avoid this route and focus on establishing and maintaining relationships with private lenders.
