The first thing a Real Estate Investor must do is to make contacts. Your contacts will include property managers, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, builders and all types of real estate professionals. An investor must utilize these contacts to do the “leg work” in purchasing and maintaining real estate. The real estate investor’s job is to make a decision and an investment.
The decision on where and what to buy and the investment required to purchase the property. That’s your only job; all other aspects of real estate should be handled by others. Making the decisions is merely analyzing the potential properties that are presented by your contacts. It is not the job of a real estate investor to contact hundreds of sellers and make offers or find buyers, these are the responsibility of real estate professionals who’s services you will utilize. Many books and programs advocate the investor taking on these responsibilities to maximize the return on each deal; a true real estate investor would rather maximize the return on their time. There are unlimited deals out there but we only have so much time, and once it’s gone you can never get it back. A real estate investor understands their time is valuable and can maximize their return on time by letting the real estate professionals do their job and earn their fee. A real estate investor trying to perform all of these functions themselves would be like a stock market investor trying to be the C.E.O of the company that bought stock in. As an investor you job is to make decisions on buying and selling and let the professionals handle the other work.