Real Estate Investing Seminar

There are valuable lessons to be learned when attending a real estate investing seminar and we've put together a little story to help you understand the importance understanding the value of your time.

Lessons From A Real Estate Investing Seminar...

It has been a jam packed summer so far, but with August here, the season starts to slowly wind down.

Night time temperatures drop a bit, and the days start to become shorter - which means the time you have to spend visiting your properties during daylight is harder to come by.

If you think about it, the extra daylight brings all sorts of possibilities with it. You have about 5.5 more hours daily than you would during the winter months to use for anything you want, like attend a real estate investing seminar. Over a 3 month period that is 495 extra hours or over 20 full days. What have you been doing with the extra day light time?

It is worth looking at.

Think about how quickly evenings and weekends will fill up during the summer. Sometimes you can’t fit the next BBQ with friends in for weeks because of the little tasks that creep into your life and occupy your time like painting the fence, cutting the grass, weeding the lawn, etc..

Which would you rather be doing? Hanging out with family and friends on a backyard patio or being an amateur landscaper or labourer?

Is your time worth the $15 an hour it would take to hire someone for these tasks?

This is one concept often covered in a real estate investing seminar.

Think about how much someone could get done in a full day working around your house. That’s 8 hours and it would only cost $120. But it could potentially free up an extra 5.5 hours of daylight time for you every night for a week (27.5 hours).

Paying someone else for things you can do can be hard to get used to. But if you are using your time for more valuable things like generating leads for your business (valuable), or spending time with family and friends (priceless), it is a necessary step.

We have never attended a real estate investing seminar and met one person who has grown their investments or business by doing everything themselves.

Out of all the investors and business owners, not one!

One of the members of our team just realized this lesson for themselves.

There was a bit of painting and landscaping to be done at one of his properties and after completing the work he just couldn’t figure out why he spent his weekend fixing up the property. When he would have seen greater returns by paying someone to do the work and focusing on higher valued priorities.

I'm sure he would have felt grateful to have learned that lesson in a real estate investing seminar, rather than the hard way!

It’s an important lesson that is easily skipped over by most people, but with the most successful people you meet, you wonder what steps they took to get to where they are. They started doing this a long time ago.

For the record, we didn’t come up with any of this on our own. Yes, we would love to take credit for it but we can’t. It was likely picked up at a real estate investing seminar we've attended in the past.

Over the years, we have found that our biggest breakthroughs come from two sources.

The first is the stacks of books, magazines, newsletters, websites, etc. that we read every month.

Whenever we are frustrated with the way things are working in our businesses, we search out resources to learn different ways of dealing with the frustration points.

The second, is speaking to and meeting with other investors and entrepreneurs at real estate investing seminars and mastermind groups. We’ll spend thousands of dollars to be part of mastermind groups with meetings that take place all over the US, but nothing has been more beneficial.

We’ll never forget the time that we got chewed out for not hiring an assistant. We had a room of about 20 people really tearing into us.

It was not fun!

But it was necessary.

We were our own obstacles.

We let our fear of having to pay someone out of our own pocket dictate the level of success we could have.

It really wasn’t logical. But we couldn’t see it on the inside.

It took a different point of view to point out something that was so obvious to us after the fact.

It wasn’t until we were basically forced to hire our first assistant that we truly understood the REAL value of paying others to free up your time, and then became information we make sure to include in our real estate investing seminar.

It is the only way to grow.

It was scary and it felt like a step backwards at first, because of the training that was involved, it took twice as long to do anything. But it opened up countless new opportunities for us.

And we ended up being very happy that we paid a whack of cash to hang out with a group of business people that basically gave us crap!

Because they were right.

When we have spoken about this with some consulting clients at real estate investing seminars, they often don't realize how much work can be delegated.

For investors, think of things like painting, cleaning, yard work, garbage removal, bill payment, book keeping, cheque cashing, rent follow up, etc.

These are all tasks that can be handled by other people for minimal amounts of money.

The money in investing is made from finding good investment opportunities/properties, and filling or selling them to qualified tenants or buyers.

That’s it, it is simple.

A couple of years ago, Nick was building a deck at one of the properties he owns with a partner… In December!! The partner was not interested in hiring someone to do the work, so instead, about 7 or 8 weekends in the cold were invested into this deck.

Can you see how the deck could have easily been paid for by focusing on higher income tasks? Plus, they would have stayed much warmer.

If you are ever on the fence about paying someone to free up your time let us know. We’ll be glad to take some of the harsh advice we got in the past and pass it along!

Tom was busy learning more lessons last month. He went to finalize our purchase on the Adriatic Coast in Croatia, but when he got there, the property was not close to ready.

There was a lot of work left to be done on the exterior of the property and on another building on the same plot of land before the deal could be finalized.

But there was another surprise waiting for him.

There was no kitchen installed in the unit yet, and there were no plans to install one!

It seems that only running the rough in for the kitchen is normal procedure over there and it got lost in translation… SURPRISE!

Needless to say, there were some moments of thinking, “what have we gotten ourselves into?” So Tom’s original itinerary of finalizing the transaction, dropping off the 4 suitcases of supplies he brought over, shopping for a few pieces or furniture, and spending ample time in the Adriatic Sea, was now inaccurate.

It changed to shop for kitchen cabinets, sink, taps, appliances, custom closet for bedrooms (also not included), light fixtures, furniture, find person for installation, update budget, open bank account, meet with lawyer to understand how we can close on the property in October if we are not there, and jump into the Adriatic only once or twice.

As you can see, we still go through the same learning curve every investor goes through when dealing with a new type of investment, or in this case, laws in a different country.

Many people wait for the day when these hiccups stop happening. Fortunately, they don’t. Yes, FORTUNATELY. If they did stop, this means you would not be growing and expanding. With every new venture comes challenges. If you are currently investing, and waiting for the day when all the bumps in the road disappear you may as well stop now because it ain’t gonna happen.

The real challenge is how you get to the level where the current roadblocks you have look like pebbles and you have even bigger problems to tackle.

When we meet with people, they often think the principles we talk about don’t apply to them because we have been doing this for a while and are not starting out like them, or that we are just trying to be motivational.

In case you didn't’ know, here’s some news for you. Whether you are starting out or have been investing for 50 years, the same cycles will repeat themselves, just at different levels.

So a leaky basement that used to be the end of the world to us, is now somewhere in the middle of the list of things to address, with a phone call to someone qualified.

We have bigger things to worry about, and you will too.

As for being motivational, that is in the eye of the beholder really, but it is not why we do this.

Our goal is to help you avoid many of the mistakes we made, which we share in our real estate investing seminar. It’s to take the lessons that hundreds of investors are encountering every day and sharing with us, and share them with you.

There is power in numbers and the RSIC is full of experience and lessons that you can tap into anytime.

It is the equivalent of us paying thousands of dollars to speak with other entrepreneurs.

We were sick and tired of baloney, hyped up, real estate tactics, that sounded good in a hotel banquet hall but were near impossible to execute in the real world.

There is a difference between theory and practical knowledge. Although theory has value, in this game you need your share of street. For example, we dealt with a tenant whose option agreement was ending but she was not responding to our emails or phone calls.

In the end we kept some great tenants for another year that will generate over $20,000 of income for us, but there were steps that got us there.

Simple, repeatable, steps that we have learned over time, and you can learn too by attending a real estate investing seminar.

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