Real Estate Investing For Beginners – What Every New Investor Wishes He’d Been Told Before

As a new real estate investor, when you begin researching information on real estate investing for beginners, you’ll find that there are a lot of gurus and mentors out there looking to sell you high priced information. You’ll also find plenty of chatter-boxes at local real estate investing forums and other watering holes that will share (brag?) all day long about their investing trials and tribulations, especially if they have tenants or rehabs. (Those types of projects tend to be fraught with problems, something that can scare beginner real estate investors off – when maybe it should be attracting them!) You can also find some excellent offline resources at the library, bookstore and your local investor club. Maybe you’ll even find someone who’s out in the trenches on a regular basis and is willing to take you out on the streets to show you some of his properties.

What you won’t find as often, especially for free, is a coherent, executable business plan detailing what it takes to get going with real estate investing as a beginner.

What you really need is a handbook entitled: Real Estate Investing For Beginners that lays everything out for you A to Z, with what to do at every step along the way.

Unfortunately, putting together a super and useful reference like that is time consuming and you have to consider that a) If someone is already making money investing in real estate, her time is valuable, and b) if she’s going to invest her valuable time in putting together a real estate investing guide for beginners, she’s got to have an angle.

That’s an excellent thing to keep in mind – everyone in the real estate investing education industry seems to have an angle. They are directly incentivized to make you feel that real estate investing is easy, you can do it, and if you just part with some money, they will give you the handbook with all the answers.

BEWARE: If you can’t figure out how they’re getting paid, you’re missing something… Everyone wants to get paid in this business.

Well, I hate to tell you… I don’t have that comprehensive handbook for you either.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I can give you some very important words of wisdom that helped me when I was getting started in real estate investing as a beginner. (And I started right out of college without a good job or anything, so don’t think it can’t be done.)

Real Estate Investing Observations – What Every Real Estate Investing Beginner Needs To Know:

1) You will have to trade time or money to get what you want in real estate. You can’t get something for nothing, so even if you buy an expensive course to get someone else’s experience and shave years off your learning curve, you’ll still HAVE a learning curve. Plus, you’ll need to find leads, and that type of marketing takes (you guessed it) time and/or money.

2) Leverage cuts both ways. When the market is going up, leverage can be a great ally in helping you acquire more property with less of your own money. However, when the market is soft or declining, as also happens with real estate market cycles, having a lot of leverage can put you “upside down” on your equity and cash flow – a very risky situation. Protect yourself by “making your money when you buy” and passing up those “skinny” deals.

3) It’s all about NEGOTIATING with the motivated sellers. A lot of courses make you believe that if you find the motivated sellers, you can just pluck up the deals like daisies in the orchard. That’s almost true. Whether you’re working in commercial or residential real estate, you’ll get much better deals when you negotiate with a motivated seller. However, the key is that you must NEGOTIATE. You have to make offers that will work for you and engage the sellers in conversation. Very rarely will the buildings be lying these listed for 50 cents on the dollar (if they are, they’ll be snapped up by other investors). You have to find sellers that you think may be motivated and offer them your low cash offer or terms offer in order to see if they’re willing to work with you. Engage them in the conversation by making lots of offers, and NEGOTIATING with the ones that are motivated.

4) Figure out your rate of return. Sometimes, when you don’t have a deal, it’s easy to think “any” deal would be good. However, sometimes the best deals are the ones you PASS on – you “make” your money by saving yourself from some expensive mistakes. Don’t waste time on property that doesn’t make sense when you run the numbers. Don’t get emotionally attached just because someone says they’re motivated or willing to work out terms with you. Run the numbers. Always focus on the numbers.

5) You get paid for solving problems. This is a business with a lot of problems. Sellers can get very emotional, or have a lot of financial trouble, at the time that you’ll be working with them. That’s stressful for anyone, especially when the transfer of a large asset like a house, apartment building or office/retail center is involved. Realize that you may go through some challenging emotions of your own. That’s natural. If you can hold it together and survive the up-and-down roller coaster, you should do okay.

No one says real estate is easy unless they have a course to sell you. It can offer some great returns, but there’s a reason not everyone goes after them. Not every property is a winner and finding and acquiring the winners can be a challenge. However, if you are committed to making your real estate investments work for you, then focus on getting yourself educated and staying in for the long run.

Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation

Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.

If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.

Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.

For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.

No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.

There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.

Take Action For Success In Your Home Based Business

To realise your dreams and success in your Home Based Business is a journey and a process, not a happening, you can only be successful if you understand this journey. We must learn the principles from other businesses and apply it to our own Home Based Businesses in order to reach our destination.The starting point of any journey is to have the end in mind and to stay focussed and motivated to reach that end you set for yourself. Where do you want to be, go or what do you want to achieve? The end of the journey can be seen as your dream. That goal or dream must be worthwhile, reachable and realistic. When you achieve it, it must make you happier, give you more pleasure than your present situation, or solve a problem that you have now, whatever it might be. You must be willing to sacrifice on this journey to reach the destination. This sacrifice must be less than the “pleasure” or fulfillment that you will realise as part of the dream you set for yourself. A very important factor to remember when starting your new venture or Home Based Business is that you must feel personally fulfilled with what you will be doing on a day-to-day basis. It should not become just another “job” you’re doing, but rather an enjoyment to improve or change your current and future circumstances.With a Home Based Business, many people have achieved their dreams of financial independence and/or having a lifestyle that they prefer and earn a sustainable income stream. Others have done it, you can too. You must have a clear dream and believe in your dream and you must take the following issues into consideration in the planning of this journey. If you follow these guidelines, you will be able to achieve your goal on your journey as a Home Based Business owner.The question is: What in your present situation is not acceptable? We want to assist you on the journey to achieve your dream. Let us guide you in planning your journey. The destination of the journey is worth a sacrifice to achieve it. Have a passion to live your dream as part of your journey and believe in yourself.To have a dream, without a destination or goal, and without being willing to take action will be futile.I do believe that you have your dreams.
I am convinced that the goal you set yourself is worthwhile to achieve.
I do believe you want to or need to change and improve your present situation.Then it is time to make a decision and take action. Without action, you will not achieve your dream. This journey must start with action and must be action orientated.Critical Planning for the Home Based Business JourneyHow to start:Start with yourself. What is your passion? What do you care about in life? Make a list.
Take a few minutes to do a personal inventory of your dreams, goals and the problems that will be solved once you have reached your destination.
Define the resources you have: money, knowledge, experience, equipment and your own time. Make a list.
Decide how much time you are willing to spend every day, week or month on your new venture. What are you willing to sacrifice in the process? Maybe spending less time with friends and family, whatever it might be. How much of the other resources are you going to make available? Make this decision in advance.Innovate:Develop new ideas on how to do things, or develop better products or processes. If you do not have new ideas, just start with what you have on a small scale.
Ask yourself: “What is my advantage or area of excellence that differentiates me from my competitors?”
Think of your product, service or the online business you want to promote or sell and work those thoughts into your business plan that you set up for yourself to start a home business.
Test your ideas with friends, family or acquaintances and apply their feedback with your marketing strategy you had in mind.Experimentation:You will make mistakes, so take small steps. If you do make mistakes, make sure that the cost is not too high. You cannot afford to lose too much time or money in this learning process.Action:Now, put your ideas and experimentation into action to get customers and make some sales!
Market your product or service to publicize your business by internet, marketing, advertising, promotions, referrals, and word of mouth.Failure:We all set high expectations for what we want to achieve, but when failure occurs are you mentally ready to deal with it and put your strength back into what you have started?
The only way you will learn is by doing things, taking action and making mistakes. Learn from that and move forward with the next baby step.
Eliminate any negativity that might cause you to fail and keep those positive thoughts and the outcome of your journey in mind.Believe In Your Home Based Business JourneyI am a great believer in the principle of spending time to study many possible Home Based Businesses, instead of jumping to the first because the big salesman has promised me a jackpot. Later you will find that there is no gold in that pot.I will give you reviews on different Home Based Business possibilities or programmes with the pros and cons in order for you to make a decision on what will suit your requirements best. Dreaming of owning your own business and the excitement it is much different from actually putting it all into action.With your excitement, your motivation and the experience and knowledge of the group of experts that I am associated with, we will show you how to stay motivated and assist you with each step to reach your dream.You can dream-it-plan-it-do-it and achieve your goals. Join our community to receive more information on how to become financially independent and finding the right solution.