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A Buyer's Market
5 Ways to Succeed in Real-estate Investing
By Vena Jones-Cox
Any basic text on a particular strategy will show you the skill set you need to make money with that strategy. You don't need to know how to manage properties or how tenant-landlord law works if you plan to wholesale or retail, but if your strategy is to rent or lease/option, these are important to know.
On the other hand, some skills are crucial no matter which strategy you use: the ability to find the value of properties, to find motivated sellers of properties, to talk to and negotiate with sellers and to put your offer together.
Make a list of the things you'll need to know to make your strategy work. Then figure out how you're going to get the information. There are endless workshops, home-study courses, videotapes and books about practically any real-estate-related topic you can imagine. Finding the information will be no problem, once you know what information you need.
Jones-Cox has taught a lot of classes to a lot of new investors, and she's found something interesting: Those who haven't actually practiced looking at properties, evaluating them and making real offers have extremely unrealistic ideas about what's going to happen when they do.
Beginners have preconceived notions about the objections sellers will pose to their offers that bear no relationship to the objections they actually end up raising. They have fears about being unable to find or evaluate comparable properties. They think they'll be mysteriously blind to the repairs the properties need, when in fact they are pretty obvious.
In short, until you've actually gotten into the real estate market, you simply don't know what you don't know. You cannot make money in real estate without making offers, and you will never develop the knowledge you need to become a successful investor until you get the real-life experience of making offers.
The more quickly you take the steps above – even if you're not sure you know what you're doing – the more quickly you'll move from a wannabe to a real-life investor!