Im fairly new to real estate investing, w/ reading several books about investing, ranging from authors like Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Conti, David Reed, Dolf de Roos, and take notes about what I learn. However, the only thing i can imagine to get ready for investing is to eventually join a local real estate investing club in my area to start building up relationships w/ other investors. Can anyone recommend different ways to get started and develop some confidence about re investing? or does joining a club seem the best?
Hi Dragon,
The first thing I usually recommend is to decide what your investing strategy is going to be. It’s not really important if you decide to be a wholesaler, rehabber or landlord. What is important is that you choose one path and follow through with it.
This way you can have an agenda when you go to the REIA meetings. You’ll want to meet other people who are wholesaling, rehabbing or what ever.
It’s very important to have pin point direction when you first get started out.
thanks a lot scostell, i think as a beginning investor, to bild up my confidence, i will start off with wholesaling , then slowly branch off into other techniques to master. i only feel disappointed that rei meetings are once a month instead of once a week. HOpefully during that one day per month, I will be able to make a lot of friends and hopefully find someone willing to work with me. scostell, do you know the best general places to network or find other real estate investors?
I think you should start by getting your feet wet.
- Start contributing towards an investment fund (minimum 10% of your income/monthly)
- Begin to research market areas and target the neighborhoods/areas you want to invest in. I would start with 2kitchen properties. Work as hard as possible on this step - to the point of knowing the exact streets you want to invest into.
- Monitor the properties in this area. If any of the properties are not maintained well or look vacant attempt to contact the owner to determine if he/she is interested in selling.
- Purchase properties at a minimum 15-20% below market value, minimize the transaction costs
- invest in long term projects. determine the right balance between cashflow and equity.
In the beginning when you purchase properties try to put as much down as possible 20-35% in order to build up a strong equity position. Once you have built up a small portfolio of assets and have a stronger equity position you could decide to do larger projects by leveraging the portfolio.
Good Luck
I disagree. Putting down as much as possible bleeds out your cash reserves. Find ways to do this with putting as LITTLE DOWN as possible or NO MONEY DOWN. The name of the game is controlling lots of RE (unless you just want the headache of one or two SFH rentals). The best way to do that is buying at a deep discount to ensure great cashflow and putting no money down so you can keep buying more property. Get the equity by buying at a discount - not because you put thousands down.