Real Estate Investment Houses

No Marketing Strategy At All

This is when you don’t have a plan at all you just start throwing money at it and hope something will sell or rent your property for you. The first thing you need is a plan. How do you plan on getting in contact with sellers, buyers and renters.

Not spending time to see what works and keeping at it

Everyone has their own approach but without trying different things and figuring out what works for your business you are setting yourself up for failure. Once you have things that work do you continuously use them or bounce around? Stick with the things that work and get rid of those that don’t.

Wasting Your Money

One sure way to put yourself out of business is to waste money or not have a budget. If your budget is low them use your money for the things that give you the most bang for your buck.

No Competitive Advantage

Going to your local Real Estate Investors club meeting and paying attention to what is going on in your area will help you develop a cometitive advantage.

No Persistence

Investing in Real Estate is a business, treat it as such. If you continuously bounce around with little or no focus on the business your business will fail.

Not using your creativity

Just because something works for one Investor doesn’t mean it will work exactly the same for you. You need to remain open minded and come up with creative ideas. This will also help with a previous point, having a competitive advantage.

You have just spent the last 6 months rehabbing your first investment house. You have had mortgage payments, utility expense and the cost of repairs. The last thing you want to do is go out and buy furniture and decorations for the property. But wait, could this extra expense actually pay for itself? Think about it. The difference between selling an empty home and having a nicely staged house is so dramatic that it could actually raise the value of the home.

Going this extra mile to really make your house shine will be a no-brainer after the first time you do it. When a potential buyer sees an empty house they usually think this is a motivated seller. But when they see a house the is furnished or at least partially furnished with nice decorations they start feeling like this place has potential.

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At some point, in order to be a Real Estate Investor you have to actually invest in Real Estate. I know that sounds a little obvious but I am sure there are more than one you reading this that is stuck in “Analysis Paralysis”. Analysis Paralysis happens to pretty much everyone that invests in Real Estate. Its not a small thing to invest in property, so it goes without saying that you should do your homework and spend time working out the deal to make sure that it will make you a profit on the back side. But if you get caught up in all the information and can’t make a decision you will be stuck in analysis paralysis forever

I for one spent a good year just spending time learning about how deals are structured, how the financing can be accomplished, what type of investments there are and everything I could learning about investing in Real Estate. Then my partners and I started going after deals. For us the Sheriff sale seemed to be the easiest entry point. We would go through the foreclosure list, narrowed the list (which was about 80 properties a week) then researched about 15 strong candidates. Then we would set our maximum bid and go to the auction.

The first time or 2 we had our properties that we like and got caught up in thinking what we have on the line and all the “What Ifs”. Never even opened our mouth because we got caught up in analysis paralysis. Then on about the 4th auction we finally got our first property which was to be a quick cleanup, paint and carpet and sell it to a nice couple looking for their first home. We hadn’t even started painting before we got an offer from a landlord and made a quick $17,500.

After that I wondered how many we let slip by that we could have quickly turned around. Bottom line is you just need to make sure you do your homework, and take action on the facts you come up with.

This question comes up more times than not when I am talking to someone looking to get started in Real Estate Investing. Whats the easiest way to start Investing in Real Estate?

For me this was very apparent, I needed to learn a lot. At first it was like taking a drink from a fire hose. Fortunately I was very thirsty for information. There are a lot of places to lean the ins and outs of Real Estate Investing but the best place to start is finding your local Real Estate Investors Association. You can usually find them on the National site here. Real Estate Investors Associations usually meet once a month and from what I have seen are very organized. There are beginner, intermediate and advanced sessions, a library to check things out, national guest speakers, and more importantly other like mind successful investors to network with.

If your ready to move on but still not ready to finance your own deal you could do a little bird dogging so that you are getting out there chasing down those leads. I’ll explain Bird Dogging in the next article.

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