Why Real Estate Investing is a Process

One thing that many people do not realize is that learning to invest in real estate is a process. They don’t realize that because they often only see the end result – a prosperous person with a Midas Touch, or a person who always finds themselves in an avalanche of great deals. They think the person was just in the right place at the right time.

Someone who has truly begun their own real estate journey knows, however, that these successful investors are utilizing a skill they have developed over time. Perhaps they have indeed developed a knack for being in the right place at the right time. However, that innate ability to “be in the right place at the right time” was developed over years of learning. These investors learned when to go where so that deals could find them.

It’s like considering a hunter lucky because he tends to find deer in the woods, while you never see any in the city. The hunter isn’t lucky because he knows he has to go to the forest if he wants to find deer. It’s mindbogglingly simple when you really begin to think about it.

Ken McElroy, a previous guest on The Old Dawg’s REI Network Podcast #185, and the author of “The ABCs of Real Estate Investing,” one of the Rich Dad book series, said that, if you begin to do the things that investors do, you will start to see patterns. You can use those patterns to determine your course of action. It’s just another way of saying, “Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.”

People who just don’t get that concept, or who refuse to accept it because it is attached to the concept of work, tend to be magical thinkers and get-rich-quick schemers. They think there is something mystical at work, when the only thing really at work is the investor. McElroy says that there are some people who just don’t really have the desire to do the work. Those tend to be the dreamers, and they are that way because they want to be.

However, if you do have the desire to do the work, and all you need is to be told what work to do, then there is hope. You can learn the technical skills. Those are the people, McElroy says, for whom he wrote “The ABCs of Real Estate Investing.”

Elsewhere in the Rich Dad series, Robert Kiyosaki, who started the series, said that the people who do lose big in real estate investment are typically the ones who jump in without first taking the time to learn about investing. They simply don’t know how to do it. That is what people don’t understand about getting rich, and more specifically about real estate investing — that it is a process! You are no more going to swagger into the arena, plunk down your money and make a killing any more than you would swagger into a hangar, jump into an airplane and start doing loop-de-loops. That approach is likely to get you killed. That approach in real estate investing is likely to cost you a lot of money.

But if you take it slowly, are willing to learn from those more experienced than you, and allow yourself to make plenty of small mistakes that won’t make you crash, then you will begin to build a base of knowledge. You will begin to see how it all fits together and you can apply that knowledge so that you can start to make money.

It is a process.