The Real Estate Investing Journey

Having a mentor (defined as someone who has already achieved what you want to achieve and is willing to help you) to ask questions/get motivation from when you begin your investing journey (or any other journey in life) is one of the most important things you can do. When you try something different and you have yet to taste success in that area, when problems or the unexpected comes (and when you start out, everything is unexpected) it is easy to get knocked off track and lose your focus because you don't yet believe what you're trying will work.

Let's say you're out there looking at houses and submitting low offers. After 10 offers are rejected, you get discouraged and tell yourself it doesn't work, you're just chasing a pipe-dream. At that point you want to have a mentor to be able to call and share what has happened and how you feel about it. The value in a mentor comes when he says something like: "Keep going, getting rejected many times is normal. One time I got rejected 30 times before getting an acceptance". Your confidence comes back in one fell swoop and you get re-energized to get back out there and keep going. All because someone who has been there reaffirmed that what you're doing is right.

A mentor can also advise you when you're doing something wrong and save you much time and heartache from going down the wrong track. Example: "You're submitting offers that are too low, in this market you should only expect to get houses X% below market value".

A mentor can come from a number of places, you just need to keep your eyes open and be willing to have a teachable spirit and be humble enough to share your weaknesses with others. If you 'know-it-all' then obviously you don't need help, and people will pick up on that.

You may need multiple mentors in different areas. Perhaps someone who is successful in marketing can assist you on how to bring in motivated seller leads, but they won't be able to give input on how best to get a house ready to rent.

Mentors can come from real estate investing clubs (see Your Real Estate Investing Team), they can come from your team of professionals, they can come from church (example, from your Men's Bible study group), or we here at REIJourney can be a mentor. Part of our stated goal here is to chronicle our successes/failures so you can go back and read and draw from them. We want to be transparent and let you know just as much when things don't work for us as when they do.