What is my strategy?

As an aspiring student of real estate investing I was puzzled with the question “What is my strategy?” and following from it “What properties should I focus on?”

I do know I want to do buy-and-hold. But what do I buy?

My architectural experience has allowed me to work with several types of properties and people owning interesting properties (for example, a private prison). So I decided to systematize it as a mind map in order to find out what is actually interesting for me. I am sharing this with you to see if you can add other types of properties.

What did this exercise give me? I found out that I want to own a diverse range of things:

• -a marina, a car park and a hangar, – from the Transport group;
• -a tennis court, a shooting range (after my trip to Houston, which has a wonderful Athena gun club!) and a swimming pool – from the Recreation group;
• -advertising structures like giant screens and billboards;
• -a warehouse – from the Industrial group;
• -a shopping centre and many others – from the Retail group
• -offices – from the Business group

I also found there are types of properties that don’t seem exciting on the face of it (e.g. takeaway shops) because of all the regulations. For example, I was involved in a grilled chicken shop project from the architectural side, and that was a lot of trouble to get approved. But these food and drink shops seem to be a worthwhile type of investment. For example, a small coffee shop here is Sydney can be a hole under 10 sqm but will have a huge traffic. So it probably can pay rent.

Many of the properties I want to own are all rather big. It could be my architectural background, because I am also fascinated with bridges. It would be great to be involved in a bridge project one day as an investor.

Click the picture to see PDF with the huge mind map of property types. I was surprised how many there are.

I hope it can be helpful for people who want to diversify or, like me, who are looking for their own path in property investment.

If you know someone who owned some less often mentioned property, like a skating rink, please interview them and invite them to BiggerPockets! There must be people who deal with all this because all these properties are owned by someone. It would be great to hear from people who have bought less ubiquitous types of properties and what the thought behind it was.