The Real Estate Investing Secret Real Estate Investors Don’t Want You To Know

As a real estate investor who has managed to achieve the Holy Grail of total financial independence, I am used to people asking me about the “secret” of real estate investing. I’ve had people come up to me at after-dinner speeches and ask me to tell them what the formula is and I’ve had colleagues in the industry come up to me and ask for secret advice and in each case I’ve been tempted to take out a pen and write on the back of my business card “trust your gut”. That would be disingenuous, since it’s the kind of advice that means everything and nothing.

Let me explain this to you first. Every investor in the world has to operate in a way that is comfortable for them and that invariably requires them to use their gut feeling when looking for deals and when deciding to walk away. So saying you need to “use your gut” is just the kind of advice that sounds good and doesn’t mean anything.

So, to cut to the chase, what is the secret to real estate investing? To discuss this here, now, I have to draw on extensive real estate experience that has taken me from my first property to owning and managing over 4,000 apartments in eight different states and growing. You realize that what I am going to tell you has been on my mind for a long time and I have considered it in some detail and it is part of the advice that I give in my courses, seminars and workshops and it can be summed up in two words: “Risk management”.

In a sense, any type of investment is all about risk and every type of investor who wants to be successful tries to manage it successfully in order to emerge victorious. Real estate is no exception and if anything it tends to magnify the risks involved which is why risk management becomes so important and the only way to spread risk in real estate is to have a large number of people that contribute to the costs and bring you income rather than a few. This is where multi-family homes and apartment blocks come in and this is exactly where an investor’s mettle is shown.

Do your homework carefully, choose the right multi-family home to buy, arrange to outsource everything so you don’t have to deal with tenants yourself (that would definitely not be a good use of your time), use wholesale power from managing multiple properties to negotiating tough but fair deals and then getting ready to reap the rewards which, as you may have guessed, are considerable.

So now you know the ‘secret’ that major real estate investors don’t want you to know. What’s stopping you?