New to investment properties

[Philip LaRoche]

All,

I have been watching the housing market for the last few years and it has always been something I have wanted to dive into. I have owned other businesses and I had clients that owned rental property. They gave me some advice and I like what they had offered, but they bought their properties 30 yrs ago.
I would like to hear from some of you that have been doing this a while about weather or not it is worth it. There are a ton of properties where I am that I can them pick up cheaply, they all need various amounts of work, but I am pretty handy. I won't be taking out any loans as I have a partner and between the two of us we can provide the needed funds to purchase 4 properties to start.

If you had the chance to do it all again would you?
Has it been profitable for you even dealing with a tough tenant?
How much time to you spend on each property per month, once it has been rented out?
Do you have any advice for a green horn starting out?

Thank you for your comments and advice.

Phil

[Joffrey Long]

Philip,

Welcome to real estate investing. You'll get a lot of good ideas here, just watch the various threads.

But also, you might join local real estate groups. I will say that at local real estate groups, not everyone talking about "all the deals they do" is actually doing any deals - so you just have to be careful of who you are listening to.

Also, if you ask five different, successful real estate investors, they will tell you five different ways you should invest. All of them are correct, but only one of the methods might work for your way of thinking, way of doing business, etc.

Bottom line: I've learned a lot from good mentors. It takes a little time and effort to find them. Hopefully you're good at nurturing mentor relationships. You've obviously had past success in business already, so this (mentors) is probably not new information to you.

Also, I do recommend having a fairly well-defined (but yet flexible) overall plan/strategy as to where you're going with investments. My biggest mistake was for the first 15 years I didn't follow a focused plan, and wasted a lot of time "gunslinging" or investing here and there without a plan. (I'm a very slow learner, so that's why it took me 15 years to figure it out.)

Hope this helps.

Joffrey Long