How long should it take?

[Christopher Ramirez Babinski]

Hi everyone! First time poster and brand new to real estate! I am currently a kindergarten teacher working towards financial independence. 

I was just curious, about how long should it generally take to find a "good buy" that is worth fixing up? 

Additionally, I'm curious, how successful are long distance investments right now? 

Thanks in advance! I can't wait to hear from everyone! 

Chris

[James Hamling]

@Christopher Ramirez Babinski the first thing your doing wrong is just randomly looking all over the country. 

Picture it this way, a person wants to be a grade 5 teacher and asks what do you do first, is it attendance, or do they start with lecture or this or that......    What do you tell them? You correct them and say none of that. They start by developing the lesson planner way before the 1st day of class, right. 

EXACTLY. 

You forgot to develop your lesson planner first. 

To do this, 2nd step is to peg your top 3 locations to operate/search in. 

Notice I said 2nd. Because 1st step we need to get some parameters so you have any way to be able to define, target and choose those top 3. 

Step 1 is define the box your working with. 

Now when you can be involved, as in close to you, doing various iterations of flips is viable and great but I can tell you doing it remote is a vastly different and near impossible beast. That's just the reality of it. 

So define what strategy of investment real estate is viable for you. Is it LT rentals. Is it more complex strategies like build for C4D. You gotta home in on a primary strategy and at most a secondary, no more, no exceptions. 

Next we filter by budget. This right here is going to narrow that lens a whole lot. 

And lastly we have risk aversion. How ready to gamble are ya? Are you the dare devil type or are you "safety sally" looking for sure bet's? Know your personality type, mis-matches make even the best deal a living hell.     And this goes for both market risk and asset risk. A, B, C class etc. 

Now we have some parameters set that we can do a baseline search for what markets across the US fit all those, and which don't. 

From there, it's a matter of research and refine, refine, refine until you have a top 3. 

No, not top 3 people pander to you, top 3 you got yourself from your work of refining. 

Next, pack your bags your taking a trip! 

Yes, this is 1,000% necessary because you will never know like the knowing you get from actually walking the streets, driving the blocks, talking with people and seeing for yourself. 

Once you complete these steps, you'll be ready to start the action sequence of things. Developing your exact in-market buy-box, operational plan, collecting resources etc.. 

And if all this sounds like misery or just not worth doing, ok, you are not an OOS investor type yet. And then the answer is keeping it local and sorting how to make the local work better. 

Because even buying turn-key you still need to follow these steps, your just basically done once make the market tours vs being at the starting line.