People want instant rewards. But the truth is, success is about building excellent habits and preparing yourself first. To start off, create an action plan on exactly how you’re going to become successful in multifamily real estate.

Here was my action plan when I got into investing in apartments.

The first week, I did NOT want to talk to any brokers. I wanted to get myself familiar with the market first, so come the following week I could feel CONFIDENT calling brokers.

Here’s what I mean…

You need to FIRST identify which market you’re going to be investing in and fully understand why. Here’s my advice on picking the right market:

You want to invest in a region that still has some job growth, that it is not being hit too hardly by the economy, and once you pick that area, you want to then go to Wikipedia.com& do a search on your chosen region. Here you can look up the map of the area you want to invest in. (For example, “Dallas, TX” and you could look at the map NORTH of downtown.)

You’re then going to look for 20 deals (properties for sale) in LoopeNet.com, and you’re going to pin-point exactly where these properties are on the map. When you do this for several properties, you’ll pretty quickly start to see some patterns.

In LoopNet.com, you’ll see that some deals are trading for more, while others are trading for less. You’ll see the age of the property, the expenses that are incurring for it, the rental income, and more. All this data that you’re going to collect will prepare you for the following week when you get on the phone with brokers.

This is the most important thing to do when you’re starting out, because experienced brokers have been in the business for a LONG time. And if you DON’T know what you are going to discuss with the broker in terms of what and where you want to invest, the broker is going to tell you to stop wasting his or her time. You HAVE to cut to the chase with them.

So, here’s a breakdown of what you’re going to do week 1:

  1. Isolate your market and learn about it.
  2. Then go to Wikipedia.com and put in the name of your market. Read everything that you can about your market location (is it a growing area, a good & safe area, is there a lot of crime, etc.?)
  3. Lastly, go to LoopNet.comand find 20 properties to evaluate and notice some of the trends.

You’ll then be armed and ready for discussing with brokers. This will let the brokers know you’re serious, and they’ll take YOU seriously.

Go Make It Happen!