The process of building wealth through real estate investing is multi-faceted. Understanding Houston’s real estate market is one component, and developing the right mindset is another. Being a successful real estate investor requires both.
Successful real estate investors absorb information from experts on a daily basis through seminars, conferences, books, articles, and audios. Even if they only read two pages or one article each day, they make sure to learn something.
If you don’t have time to read a book, you can listen to audios in the car. The amount of knowledge you can gain from listening to real estate experts discuss their experiences in a podcast is immense.
Check out these podcasts for a daily dose of wisdom:
Listening to podcasts will help you bypass some steep learning curves. You’ll get tips about everything from lowering your closing costs to why experts hire a property management company to handle rent collection and tenant screening.
Successful Houston investors don’t spend their days hammering out repairs and chasing late rent checks from tenants. They’re successful for a reason, and that reason is they prioritize correctly, and outsource tasks they don’t have to personally perform. For example, they hire a property management company to handle the minutia of being a landlord. They’re happy to pay another company to handle repairs, maintenance, emergency calls at 3:00 A.M., tenant screening, and evictions. Successful investors have more than one property, and they don’t have time to manage all of them. If they did try to manage everything on their own, they wouldn’t be successful.
Regardless of industry, successful people read books or listen to success audios on a daily basis. This is in addition to investor-specific information. Overall, 85% of wealthy people read two or more self-improvement books each month.
Take at least a half hour in each day to listen to successful people like Bob Proctor, Earl Nightingale, Joseph Murphy, and Napoleon Hill. It will help you develop and strengthen a mindset rooted in success.
Successful real estate investors are always early or on time to their appointments. They also do what they say they’re going to do without excuses that it slipped their mind. They do this through task and time management strategies.
When you say you’ll meet a client at a certain time, you need to show up. It’s not enough to tell yourself you’ll remember the appointment time, and it’s not sufficient to tuck away tasks in your digital calendar. You need to write your tasks and appointments on a piece of paper.
When your goal is to remember something, writing it down on a piece of paper is more effective than relying on a computer. We live in a digital age, but successful real estate investors know the value of pen and paper.
Two important psychological studies back this up. In the first study, college students were asked to listen to some lectures and take notes in their preferred manner. Thirty minutes later, they were tested on the material. Some took notes on a computer, and others took notes by hand. Both groups were able to recall about the same number of facts. However, laptop note-takers performed poorly when they were tested on ideas. Researchers found they took notes verbatim, which caused them to miss the context of message.
In the second experiment, note-takers were given a week to review their notes for the exam. Those who took notes with a pen and paper did significantly better than laptop note-takers. They even did better than those who transcribed the lectures perfectly. Researchers found that typing verbatim notes leads to a lower quality of learning.
Being on time to meet with Houston home buyers and sellers is crucial. Doing everything you say you’re going to do is equally important. If you need to enter tasks and appointments into your smartphone, write everything down on a piece of paper first.
The moment a successful real estate investor pins down a time and date for an appointment with a potential buyer or seller, they schedule it in their calendar. It only takes a moment to ask your client to hold for a minute while you write their appointment in your calendar.
It’s fine to have a piece of scratch paper on your desk to take notes about appointments so you don’t need to interrupt the conversation. However, if you don’t immediately transfer the information to your calendar, you risk losing track of the appointment. It’s much safer to ask your client to hold on while you solidify their appointment. Plus, it makes them feel important when they know you’ve scheduled their meeting.
You can’t do everything if your goal is to become a financially successful Houston real estate investor. Your biggest asset as an investor is a property management company. Instead of hiring multiple people to handle the minutia of landlord duties, a property management company will handle it all.
At Green Residential, we’ve got decades of experience managing properties and handling those tedious landlord duties, so you don’t have to. Contact us today for a free analysis and find out how we can help.
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