A large portion of your success in real estate investing is knowing and working with the right people. Remember: Building and maintaining a strong real estate investment network is crucial! It’s not what you know, it’s who you know!
Why Do You Need a Real Estate Investment Network?
Maybe you are someone with a lot of knowledge of and experience in real estate investing and don’t see the point of working with other people. True – working with others might bring unnecessary headaches and might bite into your profit. However, in real estate the benefit of having the right network always exceeds the costs or inconveniences associated with it. Here are the main advantages which you will receive from building a real estate investment network:
- Ideas: Knowing more people and talking to more people in real estate is likely to expose you to new ideas and business opportunities which you will not have thought of on your own.
- Knowledge of the Local Market: Even if you are a real estate investment expert, you do not know everything about every single local real estate market in the US or beyond. Thus, you need to know people whom you can trust to share their knowledge of the local market with you before you decide to buy an income property in it. This is especially true for out-of-state investments.
Related: Out-of-State Real Estate Investing: The Good and The Bad
- Guidance and Support: Particularly for beginners, it is crucially important to build their own network because there is so much they can learn from more experienced investors and other professionals. Successful investors love bragging about their successes, so you are guaranteed to gain a lot of exposure to success stories through a real estate investment network.
- Partnerships: Real estate investment partnerships can be a great way of increasing your worth. One of the easiest and most reliable methods of finding real estate partners is tapping your own real estate investment network human resources. When entering a partnership, you should look for people who will bring something into the deal (experience, knowledge, money, mentoring, etc.) and who are trustworthy, so it is best to work with someone that you already know.
- Reputation: Having a good reputation is another key element to succeeding in real estate investing. You want the people you work with (agents, brokers, banks, tenants, etc.) to have heard good things about you. Thus, you want to build a strong reputation within your real estate investment network. Then the people from your network will spread the word about you.
How Do You Build and Maintain a Real Estate Investment Network?
Now that you are convinced of the importance of having a strong real estate investment network, let’s see look at the places where you can attract the right kind of people into your network.
- Auctions: Auctions are a great place to meet serious, responsible investors and professionals because the rules require the winning bidder to close on the property very quickly. This means that only people with serious intentions and who know what they are doing go there. So, go to auctions, and while you are there, make sure to talk to as many people as you can, especially those who win the bids.
- Real Estate Investors Association (REIA) and Landlord Association Meetings: All states and most cities have a real estate investors association and/or a landlord association, which meet on regular basis. Make sure that you attend these meetings frequently. This will allow you not only to stay on top of recent developments in your local real estate market, but it will also let you meet local investors and experts. The fact that such meetings are held periodically allows you to build on your relations with those investors and professionals by meeting them regularly without having to put any efforts. Moreover, don’t limit yourselves to your city or state. Try to attend the meetings of associations in other locations too.
- Chamber of Commerce Events: Similarly, most towns have a local branch of the Chamber of Commerce, so you can attend their meetings and other events to meet professionals from real estate, law, finance, and accounting.
- Home/Trade Shows: Attending such shows and exhibits in your own city or outside of it will give you the chance to meet investors, contractors, lenders, building suppliers, and others who work in real estate.
- Social Media and the Internet: Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter all offer amazing opportunities for connecting with other real estate investors and professionals. Social media gives you the additional advantage of being able to continue building your real estate investment network from the comfort of your home or office. Also, when reading blogs related to real estate investing, always make sure to leave a relevant comment or question. You can engage in a very meaningful discussion with people from around the US or even around the globe on important real estate issues, and you might actually end up retaining these people in your network in the long run.
- Partnerships: We said that having a good real estate investment network can play an important role in finding an appropriate partner for your income property business. Well, the opposite is also true. If you enter into a partnership with anyone from the world of real estate investing, his or her network automatically becomes yours too (at least for the purposes of this specific project). So, partnerships are an easy way of doubling or even tripling the size and expertise of your network.
What Do You Need to Build a Real Estate Investment Network?
While you can attend all possible real estate events in your city and you can try to talk to thousands of professionals, you might still fail at having a good network. You need to know that building and maintaining a real estate investment network requires a lot of work in addition to certain qualities:
- Time: You will need to devote a lot of time to meet the right people and maintain a continuous relationship with them.
- Efforts: You will actually need to put a lot of efforts into this job, a network will not just naturally come to you.
- Communication Skills: You need to have some inherent skills of communicating with others in order to build a network, but you also need to practice these skills. Your ability to maintain meaningful communication with other real estate investment professionals will improve over time.
- Active Networking: Even after you think you have built the needed network, you will need to put efforts into keeping it alive and adding even more people to it.
- Reciprocity: After all, people enter your real estate investment network because they expect to receive something in return, not because they feel a need to help you. Thus, you will have to learn to give before you can receive something from your network.
Whom Do You Need in Your Real Estate Investment Network?
Because real estate investing is a complex, multi-disciplinary matter, your network needs to be diverse, comprised of people with various kinds of expertise. Some of these must-have professions include:
- Real Estate Agents
- Contractors
- Appraisers
- Inspectors
- Mortgage Broker
- Real Estate Attorney
- Insurance Agent
- Bookkeeper
- Other Real Estate Investors/Landlords
- Property Managers
Related: Professional Property Management: Pros and Cons
So, remember, if you think you are ready to start investing in real estate, the most important tool that you will have (other than your intelligence, common sense, and money) is a good real estate investment network. Start working on this network now!