The following are examples of how you might answer someone who asks, “what do you do for a living?”
It is intended to be memorized and practiced aloud, in front of a mirror, making it your own, until you can repeat it, having it sound casual.
There are two versions: one is for real estate investors that are not seeking private money and the other is for real estate investors that are looking for private money.
Without Private Money
“Sometimes people need to sell a house quickly or would rather not wait to have it sold by a real estate agent or for sale by owner. My company helps those people by buying their houses directly. Then, we help people–often people who are finding it challenging to buy a house traditionally–buy the houses from us. Often this involves us renting or providing flexible owner financing to the buyers.”
With Private Money
“As you may know, the company I work for buys and sells real estate. When we buy real estate for cash, we use private lenders. We pay our private lenders 6 to 12% on notes secured by the single family homes that we purchase. When we find a deal that we are considering buying, we call our private lenders and offer them to make a loan secured by that property. They can decide whether to invest or to pass on that deal at that time. Do you know of anyone that is not getting a consistent 6 to 12% return on their retirement or other savings?”
Until my next post,
James
There is tremendous value in meeting with other investors to talk over different investing strategies… from finding deals to completing rehabs to the best landlord practices… you can benefit from their experience and knowledge. Your local investor group is a great source for this type of information swapping, but there is another level of masterminding that you may not have considered.
I adapted the idea that I am about to share with you from a practice that certain large automobile dealerships employ. What they do is set up small mastermind groups that meet annually from different dealerships around the country to share their best practices, successes and failures.
If you transfer this idea to investing, you can see the benefits of having non-local investors to swap strategies with. Without the fear of your competition, your non-local colleagues are sure to be much more forthcoming with their best investing secrets, with the hope of benefiting from your candor as well.
So, how might you go about founding your own national mastermind group? A good place to start would be to peruse various advertising that has been posted by investors on online sites like Craigslist in markets other than your own. Places to look would include ads for rental properties, ads to buy houses, and ads creatively selling properties. The ones that look like they’ve been investor placed, and are employing interesting strategies that you’d like to learn more about, are good candidates for you to pursue with a friendly phone call. You can introduce yourself and propose your mastermind plan to see if they’re interested.
Or, if you prefer a more direct, come to you approach, you can place your own ad looking for interested investors. Either way, imagine the benefits of learning about what your non-local colleagues are up to in their markets and feeling free to test out their strategies in your own market.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Tap into our existing training and consulting program for real estate investors by upgrading to our Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership today.
In a previous article I discussed the various ways of finding your key dream team members for your real estate investing business.
I talked about some traditional methods, like calling dream team members who are advertising and screening them to find great ones to join your team. I also talked about the two short cuts for finding a great source of dream team members by tapping into the networks of other real estate investors and real estate agents and brokers.
What do you do if the real estate investors, real estate agents, or brokers that you are networking with don’t have a particularly good dream team member that you need (which has happened to me) or you are seeking additional real estate investors, agents and brokers to network with?
Well, a great way for dealing with these two challenges is by placing ads on CraigsList. What kinds of ads? I’m glad you asked.
First, let’s say you are missing a key dream team member like a mailing list broker. You’ve asked your real estate investor associates and your favorite real estate agent/broker and they just don’t have a good recommendation for you. Here’s what I do: I go into CraigsList and I post an ad offering a job with exactly what I am looking for. If I am looking for a mailing list broker to get me a great list of absentee owners in a particular part of town with a certain amount of equity, I lay out, in detail, what I am looking for and post it in the jobs offered section of CraigsList that most closely relates to that type of job. I keep the ad relatively high on the page by reposting it a couple of times per week and wait for responses to come in from the dream team members I am searching for. Often, it is a friend of a dream team member that sees the ad and tells them to call me.
Here’s another example: what if you are trying to find more real estate investors to add to your dream team (and buyers list). Well, I’ve written very detailed articles about how to find investors for building a buyers list that you should read because you need to use those same strategies, but here’s another twist I would use if I was only looking to network with investors. I would post an ad to start a real estate investor networking group and then go to lunch with each person that calls in order to start a formal group of us. I’ve done this in my local market. It is an amazing way to get to know other investors.
Another way to do it is to post an ad for an “Activity Partner”. Maybe you’re looking for someone with similar real estate investing interests to discuss local investing strategies, exchange ideas and become better real estate investors.
A third example of posting ads to find dream team members is seeking out real estate agents that specialize in catering to investors. If you’re not lucky enough to be in a market that I’ve found a great investor friendly agent/broker for you to work with, then here’s a great way to start the search. Post an ad in the “real estate jobs” section telling them that you are a real estate investor who works with other local investors and you are seeking an agent or broker to help find deals for your investor group. Describe the types of deals you are looking for and the type of agent you want to work with. Some investors prefer the agent to run some preliminary numbers. Some don’t. Some investors prefer their agents to find signs of motivation. Some don’t. Some investors prefer agents who invest in real estate themselves. Some think that they’d rather not have someone skimming great deals off the top (which rarely happens). Then, keep this ad running until you find a great agent/broker for your team.
With these three methods you should, within a matter of months – and often faster – be able to find some great team members to make your real estate investing business much easier to run and ultimately more profitable.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Have you heard about your amazing Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership?
For the sake of brevity, I am going to assume that you already know why it is very important to put yourself in the middle of a great team of people to be successful in real estate investing. If you read any book about a highly successful business person, you will quickly see that that they did not do it alone. So let’s discuss how to build a great dream team for your real estate investing business.
There are many great ways to find key dream team members, which I will briefly list. I am also going to share with you the two key short cuts that I have discovered to help you find truly amazing dream team members faster and easier than you probably thought was possible.
First, let’s talk about the ways that people usually find dream team members.
There are traditional methods, like calling on advertisements in the yellow pages, newspapers, on-line in your favorite search engine, classified ad websites, and so on. This time-consuming approach rewards dream team members that are willing to spend time or money advertising to find more clients.
The second approach is to network or ask for a recommendation from a friend or colleague. I’d like to take a few moments to discuss two variations of this because they can be highly effective strategies for building a dream team.
The first variation is to get recommendations specifically from other real estate investors. Read some of my other articles for ways I go about finding other real estate investors by building a buyers list. Many active real estate investors will already know a great real estate attorney, property manager, title company and so on.
The second variation on networking is to tap into one of the best centers of influence for all of the critical dream team members. Where is that center of influence? Well, who is traditionally at the center of most real estate transactions? The real estate agent or broker.
Great real estate agents and brokers have dozens of experienced dream team contacts. They tend to know who to avoid (many times based on actual experiences with them) and who can get the job done – even in difficult transactions. They know lenders, they know real estate lawyers, they know property managers, they know escrow and title companies and they understand the real estate process. If you’re lucky, you will even find a real estate agent that has experience with investment properties and they can be a source of deals and other investors for you too.
So, you can struggle calling dream team members at random from their marketing materials, or, you can take the easy way and tap into other investors’ dream team members by networking with them. Better yet, take the super fast approach by using a great local real estate agent who will introduce you to all the key dream team members you need.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. We have an extensive list of Dream Team members will notes, tips, interview questions, selection criteria for many of them available in our training materials for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members. These materials are in addition to the over 100 real estate courses, on-going live training and free consulting sessions we also provide to our members. Sign up today for Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership.
