How did you get into real estate investing?
I’ve always been interested in building things, as my Grandfather was always building things and letting me help. He also owned investment properties and I helped in renovations and maintenance.
So I had a base level of interest and fairly deep knowledge of what’s inside a building and how it works.
Many years ago, when I was very broke, I got something in the mail (not email, mail) that said “Use our money to invest in real estate”.
It was genius because most people think that money is the number one thing you need. With that problem solved in my imagination, it was easy for them to sell me a course on how to identify investment-grade real estate.
I bought probably six or seven courses within a year or two because I was determined to learn the business.
I never used their money to do deals. In fact, they were mostly scammers selling courses.
But one of the things they advised was to build teams of local resources. And that was good advice.
In my search, I ran into a buyer’s broker and I could talk knowledgeably about what I wanted to do. He said he specializes in that and he’d help me.
By that time I understood that it was the deal that mattered, not the money. So I put together a small group of people with limited financial resources to back a deal, which my broker found for us.
I worked my tail off to make that deal work and was able to claim a 40% gain on capital within 6 months.
With that back story, I was able to attract a partner with more resources.
My broker found me another deal and several more.
Shortly I had more money than I thought was humanly possible. ($50,000 which tells you a lot about where I started).
My broker wanted to become my partner and do the best deals together. Which we did.
And I was able to log quite a bit more money in the coming years by partnering with a hard money broker as well.
I started with nothing, gained knowledge, talked people into helping me, did ALL of the work at first, and eventually farmed it all out to a team of experts, and we grew pretty fast after that.
It’s true you can invest with no money, no credit, and no job – IF you give yourself the job of becoming the investor, are credible enough to get other people’s money and assistance, AND are strong enough to control all the moving parts and keep it together through problems and growth.
There’s no free money in this world.
But that thing I got in the mail made me believe there might be. And somehow that got me WORKING in the right direction.
And be aware that I have taken HUGE losses too. Business is a learning process that never ends. We’re never that smart that life .
