Taken from: www.biggerpockets.com
By completing the previous Key to Successful Real Estate Investing while Working Full Time you should have a good understanding of what is “Core” to your business and what is “Context”. Remember “Context” should be outsourced to other team members and “Core” are items you complete.
With this you now have some things to focus on and at the top of this list is Leverage.
Leverage Time, Dollars and Equity as you build and run your business.
Given that you work full time, leveraging your time both effectively and efficiently is Key as available time is a scarce resource. However, the real trick is to get good at leveraging other resources or team members’ time. If you can find multiple ways to leverage team members time you will see your business explode with positive growth.
Let me give you a couple of examples that work in our business:
As you know we are buy and hold investors in a California market. We pride ourselves in turning ugly and distressed properties into quality rentals. However, given we work crazy hours and travel all the time it is very hard to find these properties before they get bid up or scooped up by local investors who follow the same model.
That is exactly why we listened to Tony Alvarez (Our Mentor) and learned how to work with real estate agents in our market. We spend lots of time leveraging our relationships and helping those agents sell problem properties. By working with agents and getting them to trust us as closers of tough properties, we get the phone calls when other deals fall apart.
Lots of investors will pay more for properties as we don’t get in bidding wars; additionally, we close 100% of the deals we get in escrow. Thus, on occasion we get a call from an agent about a flaky buyer or problem property. By earning the trust of these agents we can pick up some nice properties because we will close if we get the deal in escrow; of course, closing is more important than a couple of extra bucks to many agents.
Leveraging your financial resources is also key, because we want our dollars working for us as hard as possible. If you simply spend your resources and then sit back and wait you will have a slow road.
I suggest a better approach is to investigate every avenue you have to leverage your dollars. Perhaps you can find away to recycle your hard earned capital. Perhaps you can find away to leverage past 401K’s by converting to Self-Directed IRA’s? Perhaps you can find a way to leverage dollars via VA foreclosures or other like-financing options.
The final area to get focused on, is leveraging equity as the market changes over the years. You may not get a chance to use this tip for a few years, but the ability to leverage equity will be key to accelerating your business.
In our business we leverage our equity in several ways. First we did cash out refinancing when it was possible before the crash. Second and more powerful for us was when single family homes made no business sense, we sold them and did 1031 Exchanges into small apartment buildings. This exchange allowed us to leverage our equity into a lot more cash flowing rental properties.
In addition we created a business model that allows us to buy distressed assets for cash, repair the asset and then via passive investors, extract a portion of our equity by offering a 10% interest-only note and first deed of trust on the now repaired and leased property. This model works very well for us in today’s market as intrest paid on savings is very low.
Search for homes in the area of Baltimore!!
Our passive investors love the return, the security, and the fact that they get a chance to participate in the Real Estate Market without taking the risks of active investing or having to invest all the time in learning the market.
Now I admit that cash out refinancing and selling properties via a 1031 Exchange today are not great options, but over time they will be, and you need to be ready for it. As the market changes and the press picks up on the fact we have hit the bottom in the market, real estate will come back in vogue and you need to be ready to leverage your equity.
Have you noticed lately that at least 75% of the press on real estate is positive the last 6-8 weeks? When the market changes from a buyers market to a sellers market we will be ready to exchange all of our houses for small apartment buildings again. It is a very profitable strategy.
In the end the fifth key is about getting good at leveraging Time, Dollars and Equity to insure maximum return to your business.
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