How to Find the Right Real Estate Mentor
Think of a real estate mentor like a tour guide for the real estate investment world. A good real estate mentor can dramatically improve your chances of success and prevent you from wandering around, searching for solutions to common problems. Your mentor can walk you through the investment process and help you avoid any pitfalls.
Real estate can be one of the best investments you make in your life but you can still lose a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing. Every state and country has its own real estate laws and requirements that must be met to do business in their area.
A mentor can guide you through the legal requirements you will need to adhere to. Real estate investing has many nuances that a mentor can show you.
The first thing you should look for in a real estate mentor is a proven record of accomplishment. Your mentor should be making or have made a significant amount of money investing in real estate.
This is a very important qualifier. You wouldn’t pay an out of shape personal trainer so you shouldn’t invest into a non-productive real estate mentor.
You should ask your potential mentor what his past real estate experience is. This will help you find a mentor that specializes in the area of real estate that you are interested in.
They can help guide you to the strategy that will best fit your scenario. Fitting your strategy to your budget and resources is the key to success.
Once you have established the validity of your potential mentors, you are ready to choose. You want to find a mentor who you connect with. The better you get along, the easier it is going to be to teach you the more complex strategies involved.
A great mentor can look at your finances and tell you what strategy is going to be the most effective. For example, if you have bad credit, the last strategy you want to pursue is one that requires you to have great credit.
In this scenario, your mentor should instruct you on the many strategies that do not require capital to start, such as lease options or wholesaling. If you want to be successful in real estate investing you are going to need to understand how your ROI (return on investment) affects your long-term results.
Your mentor will help you to understand what the selling points in your area are. An experienced real estate investor can determine the market value of an area by checking the listing prices vs. the average sales price of similar properties in the area.
There are a number of different ways to go about this procedure and your mentor should walk you through the best market appraisal process for your region.
Some high-level mentors will even go with you to view the final properties. This can be helpful because you can see how they interact with the owners.
You can also learn what points are critical in the process. An all too common mistake made by new investors is slacking on the home inspection process.
An experienced investor knows what parts of the house need to be inspected. They can also show you how to determine if something has been recently repaired or if the homeowner is covering up a needed repair, such as a leaky basement. All of these skills will reduce your risk and improve your ROI.
Once you have found the home that fits your strategy in the location you desire, you are all ready to start the paperwork process. A mentor can save you thousands here, because most of them have access to all the necessary contracts required to make your deal work.
Real estate is all about what is in the contract. A simple clause can change the ROI of an investment significantly. For instance, if you lease an option on a home for $100,000 you may hurt your deal by putting a time restriction clause.
An experienced lease option investor would make the lease auto-renewable at the tenant’s discretion. These little clauses and customizations are the secret to making the most of your investments. Having a lawyer draft fresh paperwork from scratch is going to raise your operating costs.
Even if your mentor has drafts of the contracts you need, you should still have your attorney glance over it. In real estate, the devil is in the details, so you need to be familiar with what every clause in your contract means, and how it affects your ROI.
A real estate mentor will reduce the time it takes you to turn your strategy into assets. Save yourself a lot of money and headache by finding someone to guide you through the processes.
Maximize your profits by choosing the right real estate mentor. Start learning today at Real Estate Development Coach!
