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Ten Tips for Becoming a Real Estate Investing Coach

karen rittenhouse
4 min read
Ten Tips for Becoming a Real Estate Investing Coach

It’s an awesome feeling to be able to give back. And so many people want to own real estate but don’t know how to go about it. So, as an experienced real estate investor, how do you start coaching others to do what you do?

  1. You must have experience. This should go without saying but I’ve coached long enough that I take pretty much nothing for granted… Naturally, you must have a successful track record so you not only have the experience necessary but the accomplishments that others will want to follow. If you’ve done more than a few real estate deals, you know that no two are the same so, the more you’ve done, the more answers you’ll have and the more pitfalls you can teach others to avoid.
  2. You must have a desire to see others succeed. To be a good coach, at least. As Zig Ziglar famously said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”
  3. Your students are not your competition. We live in a world of abundance. We personally coach 40 companies right here in our own backyard to do exactly what we do. And, all of them are successful with the businesses they have created. None of us sees the others as competition. We are a family of investors all working toward the same goal – providing safe, affordable housing for others and improving our communities. There is more than enough out there for everyone. And, there is an amazing synergy that is created when you surround yourself with like minded people, all with positive energy and goals.
  4. You must be willing to put in the time. Coaching, like any other area of business, takes time to become proficient. And, of course, some students will need more hand holding than others.
  5. You will improve as you go along. In time, you’ll create notebooks, templates, chat sites, websites and more to make coaching and learning easier for both you and your students. It’s great to have a way for the students to interact with, share, and learn from each other. We started with a Yahoo Chat group and now have incorporated that to the back end of our coaching website.
  6. Why coach? Because others need help and can learn from your experience and skill set. We started coaching because so many people were asking: “How do you do what you do?” “Can I use your forms and contracts?” “Can you help me put my property into a trust?” “Can I follow you around for a day?” etc., etc. We were perfectly willing to help, but just didn’t know how. We tried meeting with individuals one-on-one to answer questions but that was most inefficient and they rarely ended up sticking with it. So we decided to teach classes.
  7. So many people want to learn this business. Our office had a conference room that would hold about 12 people. We put the word out that we were going to teach on a different topic every month (for free) right there in our office. That way we could help more people at one time which would center their focus and take some of the time issues off of us. We announced at our REIA group (it was only about 35 people) that we would be teaching and we ran a small ad in the local paper. 72 people signed up. We taught on a different topic every month for a year with an average attendance of 65. These meetings were free (for the attendees). We were renting a space and providing coffee, water, and from time to time, lunch. We were exhausted but enthused by the response.
  8. People will pay for value. Our first problems quickly became logistics: where to have the meetings; how to create power points; speaking in front of “large” groups with a microphone; creating binders. At the end of that first year, we announced that we were going to continue but we were changing our format, we were going to charge, and we would accept only eight couples/business partnerships. At our first meeting, we had 14 businesses show up with money in hand. It has grown tremendously since then. Show that you will indeed provide substance and people are always willing to pay for value.
  9. Your time is worth charging for. We have spent well over $300,000 in education and we continue to pay for our own coaching and training. What we know has tremendous value and we want only students who are serious about learning and applying what we teach. When we weren’t charging, most weren’t paying as much attention. And there is a yin and yang, reap and sow, energy exchange going on when you teach. If you give to them, they need to give something back to keep life balanced.
  10. If you build it, they will come. People are looking for a good leader. If you are successful, people will follow you.

Coaching opens up a huge world that you never could have expected.

  • Naturally, it creates an income stream.
  • We have lifelong friends that we would never have found.
  • We do a lot of partnerships with students.
  • We have created a community where real estate investors are respected and looked up to.
  • Add to that the fact that you always receive more than you give out when you teach others, and you can see why I highly recommend coaching once you’re a successful real estate investor.

Do you coach?

Photo: b k

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.