Preparation is key…or is it?
When a friend and I decided to get involved in real estate investing, be it flipping or holding rental properties, we figured that we had better educate ourselves first. We began reading everything we could get our hands on, listening to the “gurus”, searching for potential properties, talking to lenders, insurance agents and anything else we could think of. We felt like this would give us an advantage over all of the other people who turned on an episode of Flip This House and then decided to quit their jobs to start flipping houses.
As it worked out, this learning phase ended up lasting about a year. Not because we were scared to get started or because we thought we needed to learn more, but because of things in our personal lives. I believe that there is rarely a good time to start anything. When my wife and I were deciding whether or not to have a child, we asked ourselves if we were ready, and of course the answer was no, but we also knew that we would never be ready, so we might as well get started.
In hindsight, the timing probably saved us from getting in the market at a bad time. We would have been buying high and then trying to sell low when the market dropped out. Thankfully, we are now getting into the market at a great time, especially for rental properties. Prices are at a recent low, and rentals are in high-demand with the mortgage crisis. Now that we are getting started though, it seems that we are learning everything as we go. It seems like most of the stuff we learned has either changed, or is not what we were expecting. So what do you think? Is real estate something that you just have to learn as you go, or is it something that you can sufficiently prepare for before diving in?
In the near future, I’ll be posting more specific information about the deal that we are working on, so look forward to hearing about our struggles with getting started.
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