Careful Who You Take Advice From

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If you are just starting out in the business, it is difficult to know who to listen to. It seems as if almost everyone in the business has an opinion about every topic. One investor you meet will tell you to stay clear of tax liens while another will tell you that it is how they made their money. There are opinions everywhere, but the key to successful investing is knowing which to take and which to quickly discard. The sooner you can figure that out, the better your business will be.

There are anywhere from half a dozen or more shows on TV currently dedicated to real estate, rehab and investing. It can be easy to strictly follow what you see on TV, as the way it is and the way it should be. The real reality is to find someone in your local area that you trust and respect and turn to them if you have questions. You can find these people at local real estate investment clubs, networking meetings or even online. Strike up a conversation with them and see if you share the same thoughts and principals when it comes to investing. Ask them if you reach out to them if you have a question at some point down the road. In most cases, this isn’t a problem. Soon enough, you will feel more comfortable discussing future deals and scenarios.

While it is certainly important to find someone to help guide you, it is also equally important to know who to not listen to. Everyone from your local bartender to your kid’s soccer coach probably has some opinion on the real estate market, a specific property or a town you may be looking to buy in. You can listen and take in as much information as you can, but to make a decision solely based on what someone else says is foolish. Even if the person is a close friend or family member, you should know more about the business than them. Listen to everything, but decide for yourself which information is valuable and which should be discarded.

There may be pressure from the people around you to move forward with a deal or to move away from a particular one. This comes with the territory and will always be part of the business. As long as you can justify your decisions to yourself, you should be able to sleep at night. For as exciting as it can be to make money on a deal that someone may have told you about, think about how angry and upset you would be if you lost money listening to Joe the butcher or anyone else. There are plenty of people who know a lot about real estate who aren’t in the business, but there are also many people who get their information from a friend of a friend who watched 30 seconds of something on the news. Do you really want your investing decisions to be determined by this?

At the end of the day, you want any investing decisions you make to be your own or to be completely comfortable with them after you make them. There is plenty of advice abound in the real estate world, just not all of it sound.