7 Fundamental Tips for Becoming a Top-Notch Real Estate Investor

So in my true fashion, let’s look at some basic things you can do to become an awesome real estate investor. Not a single one of these will tell you how specifically to invest, but they will certainly get you into the right position and mindset — and hopefully even give you some motivation! They motivate me when I think about them.

And plus, they are easy and totally manageable to do! Sometimes real estate investing can seem overwhelming, so take advantage of the break and just think of some easy things.

Here we go.

7 Fundamental Tips for Becoming a Top-Notch Real Estate Investor

Be nice.

Well, at least most things on this list will be easy. This one may not be for some. Ha. But seriously, being nice can go such a long way! More importantly than it going a long way and helping you acquire people who want to help you, I can promise you that this industry is smaller than you think, and the minute you start burning bridges, you might be toast.

If you are going to be a jack*** and start irking people, you better have an offering so good that people have to put up with you (and that’s hard to have). People talk, and as soon as you really become a pain, more than just the person you are being a pain with will know about it. And besides, being nice ought to help you sleep better at night! Life is just more enjoyable (for everyone) when you are pleasant. But seriously, because networking is key and being nice really helps with networking, you’d be crazy to not take advantage of such an easy benefit.

Network, network, network.

Speaking of networking, it has a couple major benefits. First, unless you insist on reinventing the wheel yourself, there’s next to nothing that someone hasn’t already done, so why not take advantage of other people’s learnings and get advice on what you are trying to do and whatever else you can learn from others?

Learn from their tribulations so as to minimize how many of your own you have to go through. The other advantage is resources, whether it be people as clients or sellers or buyers or whatnot. Build your customer base! Or maybe it’s not customers but resources, like contractors and lenders and such. Real estate investing works out so much better when you let it be a team effort. Network like crazy. And be nice. It’s amazing how many people will suddenly want to help you.

Don’t take advice from people you wouldn’t trade shoes with.

Speaking of people offering to help you — there will be plenty of those. Some may want to legitimately help you, but others will want to help you for their own selfish reasons and have no problem completely messing up your roll. There are a lot of sales people out there, and there are a lot of opinionated people out there. Neither of those are bad if they do actually help you, but you don’t want to fall into a trap of getting bad advice or spending a ton for advice unnecessarily.

I’m not kidding — “don’t take advice from people you wouldn’t trade shoes with” is arguably the quote that has come in the most handy in my life. Do you know how many people either try to put their opinions on me, or yell at me for my opinions, or try to make me believe I’m completely wrong? I will tell you, if someone tells me I’m wrong or tries to give me advice, I listen to every single thing they say. I listen to it (or read it), I consider it very briefly and form a very premature opinion about it, and then I immediately look at the source of who is telling it to me in order to make a more thorough assessment.

If that person isn’t living the kind of life I want for myself, or if they are an utter jerk (more the reason to be nice — so people might actually listen to you), I’m unlikely to take what they tell me very seriously. If, however, I find someone who is living the kind of life I want to live and wants to offer me advice, I am very likely going to either take it or consider it very carefully. This is how I differentiate what advice to take and what to drop — the source. Very few people live the life I want for myself, so I am fairly focused on who I will take advice from.

If I had taken advice from the REI community when I started, I would’ve never done a Rich Dad 3-day seminar ($495), and I would’ve tried to wholesale. That seminar helped me tremendously (despite the sales pitches in it), and wholesaling sounds horrible to me! Instead, I met a guy who met me on his rooftop pool deck in flip flops at some random time during the day because he had no set work schedule and worked from home, and the minute I saw all of that and knew that’s the life I wanted, I immediately took his advice, and now here I am living in Venice Beach sleeping in every day and working only when I want to, from where I want to! Boom.

Do what comes naturally.

I wrote a whole article on how to do this. If you want to read it, check out “The One Piece of Advice That Changed the Course of My Real Estate Career.” But seriously, this falls in line with what advice to take and what advice to drop. For example, flipping can be extremely lucrative. I’ve had a ton of people advise me to flip. Well, that would be great and all but I have absolutely no interest, know-how, or skill to flip! So why swim upstream?

As much as I would love to flip, rental properties come very naturally for me. Ever heard of strengthening your strengths rather than strengthening your weaknesses? Sure, you can do that later if you want, but in getting started, focus on what comes more naturally for you! Doing that may literally be the reason you succeed in REI.

Learn lots.

And yes, you should make a valiant attempt at trying to learn new things constantly. Education is the best prevention against failure and will give you the most leverage for success. No amount of education will prevent against all mishaps and failures, and focusing on getting too much education may prevent you from every trying anything (which is required — see next point), but a fair amount is awfully helpful in getting you going.

Don’t be scared to spend $500 on a small seminar from a guru. Don’t be afraid to spend hours reading BiggerPockets material. Read tons of printed books. Network. Learn everything you can! I spent a couple solid years doing this before I found my niche. Try this article on for size for more discussion on this — “The ONE Thing You Need to Do to Get Started as a Real Estate Investor.”

Try things.

Here’s that “try” thing. Listen, get education, but at some point you must dive in and try something. Try something small. Don’t go after that $2M commercial investment; start with a small residential property. Don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose — that’s something I always heard. Now, don’t forego education and networking and valid learning in order to just dive in ASAP, but get those things, and if you feel comfortable with something, plan to do it.

Do one thing, see how it goes — worst case, it flunks and you learn from it and decide on something else later. But you seriously have to try at some point. Otherwise, you will never do anything. Trust me, if real estate investing was that easy, everyone would do it. Cliché or not, it’s true. None of us got education in school about this stuff; we’ve all had to learn it on our own, and we are all having to risk precious dollars to try it out. You just have to do it.

Celebrate failure.

OL, maybe that’s a little dramatic…you don’t have to celebrate it necessarily, but don’t see it as a deal-breaker! I actually do celebrate all of my failures because I know those failures put me just one step closer to the big success. Ever heard the sales rule of “you have to get 19 no’s in order to get the one yes?” So the sooner you get through those 19 no’s, the sooner you will get that yes!

This is absolutely no excuse, again, to forego education and networking and being smart about something, but it is a thing that can happen regardless of how much you’ve prepared, and once it happens, it could make or break your future as an investor if you let it get to you. One more side article to offer you: “The ONE Thing All Experienced Investors Know to be True (And All Newbies Will Learn!).”

There you go. Easy list, huh? Like, seriously, all of these should be doable (unless you just don’t have the personality or drive to be nice, then that’s your own issue and good luck with that).

Real estate investing should be fun, despite the challenges, and getting out of the details and how-to’s sometimes is a really good way to remind ourselves how much fun this industry can be and give us motivation to know we can actually succeed in it.

Experienced folks — am I leaving out any major tidbits along these lines that will help newbie investors? Newbies: Which tips did you find the most helpful?

Interested in Finding out More? Reach out below

Shawn Ireland

Phone: 913-225-6231

Email: Ireland_Investments@yahoo.com

Address: 1415 Main St. #823, Grandview, MO 64030

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Website: www.irelandinvestmentsllc.com/

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