What’s One Habit That Improved Your Investing Results the Most?

Question

There’s a lot of focus on finding deals, raising capital, and analyzing numbers, but I’m curious about the habits behind successful investors.

Looking back, what’s one habit or routine that had the biggest impact on your investing results?

Could be:• underwriting more deals• networking consistently• tracking KPIs• staying focused on a specific buy box• improving due diligence• following up more often• building better systems• something else

Interested hearing what habits made the biggest difference as you gained more experience in multifamily investing.

Jules Aton · Answer

Consistently investing in TSM index funds and not panic selling. Not RE specific but what moved my needle the most over the past couple of decades.

Dominic Mazzarella · Answer

The habit that helped me most was getting more consistent about tracking where opportunities were actually coming from. It is easy to feel productive looking at deals, talking to brokers, reading market updates, etc. But once I started writing down the source, timing, follow-up step, and why something was worth pursuing, it got a lot easier to see what was real work versus just activity.

For me, the biggest jump came from treating sourcing like a pipeline instead of waiting for the next interesting thing to show up. Even a simple spreadsheet or CRM can make a big difference if you actually use it every week.

JD Martin · Answer

The best habit I found for improving investing is to forget about trying to work the angles and margins and go out and actually make some money with real work. In a good part of the Western world you don't need anything more than a good work ethic, a little bit of ambition and the ability to delay self-gratification to accumulate investment dollars, which then (if invested wisely) quickly begin generating their own dollars.

Everything else is just a bunch of noise. I've known people that owned rental properties on retail sales clerk wages because they doubled down and did what they needed to do to get somewhere.

Tre DeBraga · Answer

The habit I think is most underrated: treating investing like a job with a real, structured schedule.

The temptation is to squeeze investing in whenever life allows. The problem is that reactive investing means you're always slightly behind and never building momentum.

The fix is blocking non-negotiable time for each activity:

- **Property walks** on a set day each week, regardless of whether there's a hot lead. Staying in the market physically keeps your eye calibrated in a way no spreadsheet can replicate.

- **Deal analysis** on a fixed schedule, not just when a broker sends something interesting.

- **Networking** treated like an appointment. If it's not on the calendar, it doesn't happen.

The compounding effect is underrated. Brokers start calling you first because you're reliably in the market. Your analysis gets sharper. Your network actually grows. Investing part-time is totally viable — but only if you're disciplined about protecting the time you have.

Nicholas Cokas · Answer

@Dalton, good thread. The habit I'll defend over every other one on your list: grading underwriting against what actually happened. Take the spreadsheet from a closed deal, put the actuals next to the  original assumptions line by line. Rent growth, taxes, insurance, turn costs, the exit cap that got penciled. Then write one sentence on why each miss happened.

Brutal the first time. The misses cluster in the same places for almost everyone: trusting the seller's expense numbers, underestimating insurance, assuming lease-up goes faster than it does. Once the misses  repeat in writing, they stop. Nobody fixes what they never measure against their own predictions.

Here's why this beats just underwriting more deals. Volume teaches speed, not accuracy. You can analyze 200 deals and reinforce the same bad assumption 200 times. The loop only closes when the prediction  meets the actual.

Dominic's tracking habit is the other half of this, honestly. He's measuring where opportunities come from. This measures whether your assumptions were any good once you own the thing. Input side and output  side of the same feedback loop.

Practical version anyone can start this week: open your last closed deal, add a column called "actual," fill it from the trailing 12 months of statements, and write down the three biggest gaps. Takes an  evening. The first pass stings. That's how you know it's working.

What’s One Habit That Improved Your Investing Results the Most?

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