On a scale of 1 to 100, I’d say my patience level is at best a 3, which doesn’t make for a very successful real estate investor. When investing in real estate, patience is of the utmost importance, and I’ll tell you why in this blog.
I started investing in real estate in 2004 when I bought my first home. It was a foreclosure, and we put in an offer on it the day after Christmas, which is a whole other topic, making offers in the dead of winter. While I don’t typically consider your personal home an investment, it definitely can be if you buy it right. My first real investment property was a small single family home that I bought in 2005 on a contract for deed. Stay with me, I have a point, I promise. In the attic of that house were 3 big real estate books from the late 1970’s. These books were owned by a local realtor and had newspaper clippings for all the listings in the entire market, pretty cool right. As I started to look through the pages, one thing stood out at me, the price of the homes. Almost every home in the book was priced under $60,000. Homes that were selling for $30,000-$40,000 are now selling for $200,000!
The point is to have PATIENCE! I’ve witnessed countless real estate investors come into the market, buy a few investment properties, realize it’s not as easy as it looks on HG TV, and liquidate their portfolio. Either that, or they gain a little bit of appreciation in 1 to 2 years, and because they have no patience, decide to cash out on their small profits and take a trip to Jamaica. These are both losing strategies if you ever want to gain any real wealth investing in real estate. The key creating real wealth is to let time work in your favor…..let your tenants pay off your mortgage, and let the market do what it does, which is appreciate the value of your property over time. Is it going to be a straight line up in appreciation? Absolutely not! But history has proven, that if you’re patient, the value of your investment will go up over time.
Think back to the late 1970’s, what if you could have started accumulating single family homes in our market at that time? What kind of massive portfolio would you have today? Why is 2017 any different? Do you have the patience to make a long term investment in your real estate business? If you knew you would have massive wealth in 30-40 years if you started investing today, would you do it?
While I have no patience, I have figured out that the stupidest business decision I could ever make would be to cash out on my investment properties. I’m in it for the long haul!
As always, if you have questions about getting started in real estate give me a call anytime…I’d love to help! 701-306-2019
Cheers!