If You Want to Be a Successful Real Estate Investor Stop Trying to Put the Cart Before the Horse!

It seems that nobody today learning how to be a real estate investor wants to start at the bottom anymore. What I mean is, most beginning real estate investors want to start at the top making money like those who have spent many years learning how to buy real estate and make money every time they buy. Having been a licensed building contractor in a previous life I can tell you that I never built a house starting with the roof and then built downward to the foundation. Investors today must realize it just doesn’t work trying to get rich quick without a solid foundation of basic investor knowledge. Unless you want to build a house of cards that will easily tumble down you must forget trying to start at the top of the learning curve and understand that the only way you will ever be truly successful is if you start learning real estate investing with sound techniques and strategies that will allow you to make the very best buying decisions every time.

Being a Successful Real Estate Investor Has Many Component Parts. You Don’t Have to Know Them All to Get Started But You Must Know What Will Allow You to Make the Most Profitable Deals.

Those component parts consist of finding the potentially profitable deals, next, knowing which of the deals found will be profitable and which won’t. You must next be able to analyze the numbers of each deal. You must then be able to structure a way to buy the property the seller will accept and finally, I believe the weak spot for most investors is they don’t “Make Enough Offers”. They do the first three steps, they analyze the deals to death but they hesitate to make an offer especially if they have limited access to money to actually close on any of the deals they are pursuing. I have never bought a house that I didn’t first make an offer to buy it and I don’t believe you will either.

When most investors make an All Cash offer they try to buy at a price they believe will allow them to make a profit. When their ALL CASH offer is rejected by the seller the most logical thing for them to do next is increase the purchase price they are offering. They then re-present their higher priced offer to the seller and if the seller rejects their second offer many times they walk away and forget about that property simply because they have no other ammunition in their arsenal of buying strategies. The smart investor needs to learn several different ways to make offers to buy property versus those who only make ALL CASH offers.

When you find a property you are interested in buying may I suggest collecting as much information about the property as you can get, find out about the financing (if any exists), find out what the sellers want or need before ever making an offer to buy that property. Then once you collect as much of this information as you can get from the seller go somewhere quiet and think how you can make several different offers to buy that property. I have found from my experiences over the years that there are “7” basic buying offers. Once you learn these different strategies to make different offers to any seller is when you will start of see your success rate start moving in high gear. These seven basic buying strategies are…

1. Seller Financing without Interest (Full Price Offer without Interest)
2. Seller Financing with Interest (Lower Price w/Interest Long Term)
3. Split Funded Offer (Some Cash Now-the Rest later)
4. Subject To (the Existing Financing)
5. Lease Option (A Form of Rent-to-Own)
6. Option to Buy (A Right to Buy At a Later Date)
7. All Cash (If You Have Access to the Cash)

If you can structure at least one offer of each of these basic buying offers before presenting your offers to the seller from the information the seller(s) gave you will greatly increase your chances of making an offer the seller might accept. Any one of these offers might be what the seller wants. Hopefully one of these offers may start a conversation that leads to a deal that works for both you and the seller(s). I suggest learning about these basic offer structures that will greatly enhance your capabilities of generating more profits from the deals you do.

Until next month, Good Luck and Happy Investing

Larry