What are the common habits that are found in every successful real estate investor?
Real estate investing is one of the easiest and most accessible methods for making profits and building wealth. Right?
Wrong!
While real estate investing has some of the highest potentials for profits, with over 80% of the wealthiest people in the United States having accumulated most of their wealth through real estate, in order to become a successful real estate investor and achieve the level of profits that you’ve always dreamed of, there are certain skills that you should probably have before you qualify for being a successful real estate investor.
Below are some of the most commonly found habits that any real estate investor needs to have before finding success in a real estate career. These are skills, traits, and habits that are found in most of today’s successful real estate investors, which indicates that they are in fact needed in order to become a successful real estate investor.
1. Planning Skills
The first habit of becoming a successful real estate investor is the ability to plan for both the short term and the long term of your investment. Having a solid plan can help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals, and it allows you as a real estate investor to be able to visualize the bigger picture of your investment. This can also help you stay focused on your goals and avoid being set off track by minor setbacks.
Real estate investing can be complicated and demanding. But having a solid plan can help you deal with minor issues as they arise without affecting the well-being of your long-term goals and investment.
Related: What Are the Advantages of Real Estate Investment Analysis?
2. Market Knowledge
One of the best habits to have for becoming a successful real estate investor is knowing your markets well. To become an effective real estate investor, it is necessary to learn as much as you can and obtain in-depth knowledge of the markets that you want to invest in. This can help you gain more insights into the current state of the market, as well as being able to predict the future changes in the market that might affect your investment.
The market knowledge needed for a successful real estate investment includes the knowledge of mortgage rates, changes in consumer spending habits, and even the unemployment rates in the market. This will help you rely on knowledge and actual data when planning your investment instead of relying on faith and luck to determine whether your investment will be successful or not.
Related: How to Perform a Real Estate Market Analysis
3. Developing a Niche
As you gain more experience as a real estate investor, you should be able to identify the different practices or steps that helped you find the most success in your investments. Once you’re able to identify them, this should become your niche. Meaning, these are your best practices for making a successful real estate investment, and you should try to replicate this success by repeating the same steps when entering a new market.
Each real estate investor has his/her own niche for investing depending on his/her own personal traits, skills, and personality. The most successful of these investors are the ones who are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and who utilize these traits to make the optimal decisions when investing in real estate.
4. Honesty
While a realtor, for example, might have a strict ethics code that he/she has to abide to, real estate investors are generally free to do whatever they want and use whatever tricks they can to find success on their investments.
This, however, does not mean that they should!
A successful real estate investor will have his/her own ethics code that should prevent him/her from lying to or deceiving others. This is because a real estate investor cannot succeed on his/her own, and he/she needs to build trust with other professionals in the field that will work with him/her and help him/her find success.
Be honest with yourself as well as with others around you. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, a full-time or a part-time real estate investor – always treat others as you would like to be treated.
5. Encouraging Referrals
As mentioned in the previous point, becoming a real estate investor means that you will have to rely on others fairly often to help you find success. Being honest and having good work ethics will help you build up a positive image and a name for yourself. This is an image that you will want to make professionals in the field want to work with you and refer you.
As an investor, treat other investors with respect. Build solid and positive relationships with professionals, business partners, clients, tenants, associates, and anyone else that you have a business relationship with. This will lead to people in the field referring others to your business, which will help grow your business and make it easier for you to establish other beneficial business relationships.
6. Building a Network
Both of the points mentioned above lead to this point, which is crucial for any real estate investor who wants to make a career out of property investments. One of the most important aspects in real estate investing is having access to a network of professionals and experts whom you can reach out to whenever their experience is needed, as well as for seeking advice and knowledge.
Having access to a large network of professionals will help you find the perfect match for your business. Whether it is a mentor, client, business partner, members of non-profit organizations, or other real estate investors – these are all people whom you might want to build a business relationship with, and having access to a larger network with a solid basis and a good reputation will help you tremendously.
7. Staying Educated
Real estate investing is not something that you can learn overnight – it is an ongoing process of learning that can last a lifetime. The aspects, laws, and rules of the game can change on a daily basis. New strategies and niches can occur at any time. And there is always something new for you to learn.
To become a successful real estate investor, it is important to stay ahead of the game by always expanding your knowledge and education in real estate. Additionally, staying up to date on all the laws and regulations that govern the world of real estate can help you avoid legal ramifications and/or breaking the law unintentionally.
Related: 4 Amazing Real Estate Investing Books That You Should Read
8. Understanding the Risks
Real estate investing is not a playground, and it certainly is not without risks. Becoming a real estate investor means that you have to understand the risks associated with investing in real estate, accept them, and plan around them.
If you’re entering the market as a real estate investor thinking investing in real estate is just an easy way to make money, you are dead wrong. You need to realize that investing in real estate is a major risk, and it can lead to you losing all of your money in the process.
Acknowledging these risks, on the other hand, will help you stay focused and design better and safer plans to avoid the pitfalls of investing in real estate. Not only can investing in real estate result in major cash losses for you, but it can also have severe legal implications if you’re not careful or not educated enough.
9. Hiring an Accountant
While real estate investing is a huge lake that you need to conquer in terms of knowledge, the financial and tax laws and regulations in a country like the US are an ocean of complications. Learning the different aspects of real estate investing can alone be draining and will take drastic amounts of time to learn and master. This means that, as a real estate investor, you will not have the time or the mental energy to learn the ins and outs or the tricks of the trade when it comes to taxes.
But at the same time, taxes make up the majority of your expenses as a real estate investor, and planning around them can help you save a massive amount of money. For this reason, it is always recommended to hire an accountant or a financial expert to help you. While these professionals might make up an extra cost for you, the amounts of money that they can save you through their tax and financial advice can be much higher than the extra expense of hiring them.
10. Seeking Help
Similar to how an accountant can help you save money, there are other professionals and experts in the different fields that can also help you save money or maximize your profits in real estate investing.
Some of the examples of professionals that many real estate investors attribute their success to include legal advisors, accountants, and mentors.
A successful real estate investor will know which professionals and experts are vital for their investments, and they will find the balance between the costs and expenses of hiring these people and the extra profits that they can add to his/her investments.
Related: You Need These Real Estate Professionals for the Success of Your Investment Business
To Sum Up
Real estate investing is not as easy as most people make it sound. Becoming a successful real estate investor requires a lot of effort and the commitment to growing both as a professional and as a business manager – after all, real estate investing is a business and a very profitable business in that matter.
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