There are many skills that must be developed to build real estate investment success. A successful business and portfolio will allows you to quit your job and retire with consistent, financial security and abundance.
However, the number one most important skill you need to develop that will make or break your business is marketing. Don’t get me wrong, the second most important skill is equally as crucial to your success as a real estate investor, which is raising capital to fund your deals.
Still, when it comes to real estate investing, marketing is the #1 skill you must learn. Without it, you’ll never even get to the point of needing financing to fund a deal, because you won’t have any deals on the table.
That’s right, it’s good marketing that brings great deals to the table.
As a side note, to build a successful business one deal at a time, you can’t afford to entertain subpar, lackluster deals. You need deals with ‘plenty of meat on the bones’ – ones selling at deep discounts.
These deals usually come from highly motivated sellers, who, unfortunately, are often under very stressful situations.
Secondary activities include project management, selling properties, administration, accounting, property management and more.
All of these things are important to your success but the activities that bring in the money are marketing and raising capital.
You see, marketing is the activity that helps you find great deals. If you don’t find great deals then you have no business, no properties to manage, and no money to count!
Raising capital is critical to your success unless you want to strictly be a real estate wholesaler. If you wholesale properties, you’re just playing the middleman, finding deals from sellers and transferring them to buyers at a slightly increased priced you decide on.
Still, these are not the foundational skills that you need in order to build a successful career as a real estate investment business. Your foundation to success is very universal to success in any field.
The Universal Foundation of Success
Be Consistent
Consistency is the most factor with marketing for real estate investment success in Westminster, Maryland, as it is in marketing in any business.
No matter what, do something small or large everyday to market your business. As long as you are continually hunting for deals, you’ll always find them. As soon as you stop looking for deals, they will stop flowing across your desk, guaranteed.
Try Various Strategies
When it comes to marketing, you can’t think that once you try one thing, you’ll be able to set it and forget it forever. That’s not how marketing works in any industry.
You have to constantly try new marketing strategies and make minor tweaks to the old ones in order to keep the level of success you currently have, and certainly, to grow your business.
Marketing also means not depending on a single strategy of marketing. It’s important to diversify your marketing efforts. The more diverse your efforts are, the less vulnerable you are to market shifts when your competition starts using your strategy or your efforts stop working for whatever reason.
If you have 5, 10, 15 or more ways of bringing in deals then you’ll never have a problem with bringing in big-profit deals. And if this happens, you can generate a great income and build wealth in real estate even if you don’t secure financing.
“How can you do this?” you ask.
Easy. Everybody in the real estate investment business is looking for a great deal. So if you get great at finding GREAT deals, which you will do if you implement on what you learn in this real estate investment marketing series.
In this case you can simply be a property wholesaler, which is a perfect way to start your career as a real estate investor with very little risk.
Measure to Get Better
One word of advice when it comes to marketing, you need to make it your practice to measure results and performance. Marketing is something that you must test, like being in the laboratory performing constant studies. If you’re not careful you can continue to spend money and time on marketing efforts that don’t work. You must keep track with all of your marketing efforts to be successful it.
Groundwork for Real Estate Investment Success
When you embark on any new journey, you should never do so without setting goals. However, merely setting goals is no fun. Jim Collins, in his book, “Good to Great” talks about setting what he calls BHAGs – be hairy audacious goals.
Goals need to be inspiring enough to get you up in the morning, excited when you hear them in some mythic and enough that you have fortitude to withstand adversity to reaching those goals.
Active or Passive
You have to decide whether you want to become an active full-time investor – meaning you want to transition out of your current job into a full-time role as a real estate investor. The other option is to be a passive investor – perhaps investing to grow a nest egg for retirement.
Once you decide on this, you can narrow down your options.
Risk Level
Another thing you need to consider when getting started as a real estate investor is the level of risk you can take.
There are multiple factors that dictate the level of risk you should take. Some of these factors include your emotional tolerance, available capital and experience level.
If you have a low emotional tolerance for tight deadlines and the high stress of juggling multiple irons simultaneously, you should stay away from the high-stakes game of rehabbing.
Again, if you have very little capital available and little experience in taking a big profit rehab may sound good because the money you can make but could lead to your demise.
Being honest about where you are on the risk scale will lead to more happiness, fulfillment and success in your real estate investment career.
Mind Over Matter
I’m an absolute believer that in order to be successful in real estate investing you have to go into it with the right mindset. You will not become an instant success story. Real life is not a get rich quick scheme.
Successful real estate investors are the same as any other successful professional who’s ever achieve anything great – they do it with continual practice and sustained effort made over a long period of time.
In his book called, “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell taught his 10,000-hour-rule. This basically means that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to master anything.
As you will have undoubtedly experience in other areas of your life and growth, any skill you have accomplished happen gradually over time after sustained effort, trial and error, on to mastery.
So you have to know that real estate investing is way you want to do as your path to financial freedom. You need to have such a deep conviction about this decision to become a real estate investor that it keeps you steady on the course through the roadblocks and tough times.
You have to have an iron will to succeed in order to look past the naysayers, your friends and family, even the negative experts who don’t think the market is any good right now or that money can be made.
You will need this iron will to help you get back up when the wind gets knocked out of you.
Conclusion
These are some of the most important foundational things you need to consider in preparation to becoming a successful real estate investor.
This series is going to be game-changer for you and really help you get started on your path to financial freedom.
In the next part we’re going to get into many different marketing strategies you can use to build your successful real estate investment business.
So be sure to read all the next parts of this brand-new series.
