If you’re looking to invest in real estate as a beginner investor, then these are the real estate investing 101 tips that you need to be aware of during the early stages of your investment planning.
When investing in real estate, there are multiple steps that any beginner investor must be aware of. In this article, I will briefly talk about the real estate investing 101 tips and the steps that you should follow when planning your investment.
Financial Planning
Before making any investment decisions, an investor should first decide on the financing method that they want to use as this will determine the range of the options they will have available to them.
From acquiring a mortgage that suits your investment to calculate the expenses and cash flow of your rental property, financial planning is a crucial step for your investment, and it is a step that can make your investment either succeed or fail, depending on your skills and foresight when it comes to financial planning.
When it comes to real estate financial planning, the cornerstone of your plan should revolve around the mortgage. Most real estate investors, especially first-time investors, rely on a mortgage to finance the purchase of an investment property. This means that most real estate financial planning should include mortgage and mortgage payments in the expenses section of the plan.
As a general rule, when setting a financial plan for your real estate investment, you always need to make sure that your monthly rental income exceeds your monthly mortgage payment so that you have positive cash flow. Additionally, financing your real estate investment with a loan can, in fact, increase your cash on cash return on investment as this calculation does not include the mortgage payment, but it gives you an estimate of the time needed for your investment to pay off the down payment that you’ve made when acquiring the loan.
For this reason, financial planning should be one of the cornerstones of real estate investing 101, and you should always do your research and decide on the financing method that suits you best in order to plan for your investment.
Deciding on an Investment Strategy
The real estate industry is a vast one; there are dozens – if not hundreds – of different real estate investment strategies, niches, and ideas to make money as a property investor.
Real estate investing requires the ability to mitigate risk and attention to detail, neither of which are the result of poor planning. To blindly enter the real estate investing business is to practice ignorance, as the nature of the real estate investing market is ever changing and unpredictable. Those who aren’t prepared for the fast-paced environment are quick to end their careers as real estate investors.
This is why it is crucial for you, as a property investor, to understand the best real estate investment strategies and choose the right one for you. In doing so, you’ll have a direction and focus in your real estate investing career, thus giving yourself the best odds of success.
Some of the best real estate investing 101 strategies that can be used by beginner investors include:
- Buy and Hold
- Fix and Flip
- Rental Strategies
Rental strategies, in particular, are favored among beginner investors because they are easier to manage, plan, and succeed at, and they are less risky than other real estate investment strategies. For this reason, rental strategies are usually the #1 investment strategy that you’ll find in most real estate investing 101 guides.
Finding an Investment Property
Of course, the most notable and crucial part of your real estate investing 101 journey is the step of searching for and finding an investment property.
When searching for a property, there are a number of things to keep in mind:
- The location of the property
- The rental strategy
- The size of the property
- The seasonality of the property
- The type of tenants that the property will attract
These are but a few of the several aspects that you need to consider when trying to find an investment property.
In this step, some of the best assets that you can use are online websites and platforms that can help you find and analyze investment properties quickly and with ease.
To start looking for and analyzing the best investment properties in your city and neighborhood of choice, click here.
Mashvisor, for example, is an online real estate analytics platform that allows you to search for investment properties using custom filters and search tools, and to analyze each property for its estimated returns in order to help you make wise investment decisions.
Final Notes
Real estate investing has much more to it than that. In fact, real estate investing is a form of art, and the possibilities and creative strategies that are being used in today’s investment markets are endless.
So, when it comes to real estate investing 101, there isn’t a single conclusive guide that will tell you everything you need to know or learn about investing in real estate. Instead, the process is an ongoing one that will require you to do your own research and learning in order to find what suits you best.
However, if you’re looking for a good place to start, Mashvisor’s blog offers thousands of blogs that are all related to investing in real estate, from real estate investing 101 guides to the more advanced tips and tricks that you can do in order to maximize your returns and find the perfect property to invest in.
Also, don’t forget to checkout Mashvisor, which can help you turn 3 months of research into 15 minutes with the use of predictive analytics and machine-learning algorithms, as well as several other tools and features that are all designed to help beginner real estate investors become professional-grade investors in the least amount of time.